A virtuous cycle: how green companies grow green employees (and vice versa)

Stakeholders increasingly evaluate contemporary organisations on their environmental performance. Consequently, pro-environmental or “green†behaviour and its drivers are becoming an important aspect of workplace behaviour. In this regard, we outline how organisations can encourage their employees to be green at work. Importantly, we note that individual green behaviour contributes to system-level environmental performance. Thus, we consider an organisation as a complex adaptive system wherein employees create a workplace environment that subsequently influences their activity at work. We describe this as a virtuous cycle where employee green behaviour builds a green organisational culture, which then encourages more green behaviour. By helping employees modify the local rules guiding behaviour to include EGB, organisations might be able to enhance the effectiveness of their formal structures and develop a positive culture towards environmental sustainability. To this end, we provide recommendations for practitioners in this area.