This project proposal seeks to address the above-mentioned question by examining how persuasive information systems (IS) can help encourage employees to behave pro-environmentally in the long run.
Following Stern (2000), we define pro-environmental behavior (PEB) as all behavior types that change the availability of materials or energy from the environment or alter the structure and dynamics of ecosystems or the biosphere, regardless of whether people are aware of or consider environmental impacts of specific behavior when making decisions. PEB at work includes a broad range of actions such as recycling, environmentally sound business travel, reduce printing, and conserving resources such as electricity or consumables (Lee et al. 1995).
Pro-environmental employee behavior is considered an important category of employee behavior, since it has a positive impact on key economic (cost efficiency, growth) and environmental (reduction of resource usage, waste, emissions) performance indicators (Lubin and Esty 2010; Moon et al. 2014), and fosters corporate social responsibility (Jones 1996). We know from literature, especially the sociomaterial movement, that IS are entangled with human activity (Orlikowski 2007). However, as Seidel and Berente (2013) point out, this literature has to date focused mainly on the interplay of human and material agency within idiosyncratic contexts, but has downplayed the roles of structures and institutions. Thus, our interdisciplinary research framework integrates technological, organizational, and human factors to understand how to encourage employees to act pro-environmentally in the workplace by leveraging the persuasive, motivating, and empowering potentials of IS.
We will use the setting of three organizations that have already agreed to participate in the study to examine these relationships. This will afford us the opportunity to collect attitudinal and behavioral data from employees in diverse and real work environments and to experimentally test the effects of an IS-based intervention system on PEB. With this approach, we look to theoretically and empirically account for both the local idiosyncrasies and the regularities across these practices. From a practical perspective, we will also use this framework to understand how to enhance PEB in organizations.
The proposed investigation will contribute to theory in IS and organizational behavior and science, since it will provide needed insights into the impacts and interplay of competing institutional logics, psychological dynamics, and affordances of IS in organizational sustainability transformations. Particularly, we seek to examine how IS need to be designed in order to provide affordances to users that fit the particular institutional logics setting of organizations by conducting interviews, surveys, and field experiments with multiple established working groups. We will also collect observational data from these working groups. Our project will specifically contribute to the scholarly understanding of how technological, organizational, and human factors interact to influence employees’ PEB. Thus, it will contribute to the call for more research on bringing together institutional logics, sociomateriality, and affordance theory (Seidel and Berente 2013; Volkoff and Strong 2013).
