Examining Employees’ Pro-Environmental Behaviour: Green Human Resource Management Perspective : Case Study in Three Russian Companies

Sustainability and responsibility towards ecological issues are becoming a more popular concern in Russian organizational environments. Companies start to include pro-environmental practices in their activities and processes, and as a result, human resource management also evolves into Green human resource management (GHRM). GHRM refers to managerial employees-related activities that lead to an improvement in organizational environmental performance. In this regard, employees’ pro-environmental behaviour is the main aspect that allows for improvement in environmental performance through changing employees’ behaviour in the workplace. This thesis explores employees’ pro-environmental behaviour in Russian organizational contexts, and examines how GHRM practices are related to employees’ pro-environmental behaviour. This study includes two main parts. First, an extensive analysis of existing academic literature on the subject was undertaken in order to theoretically conceptualize employees’ pro-environmental behaviour and GHRM. These issues are relatively new in academic research; thus, the theoretical part of this thesis attempts to derive a more coherent theoretical approach to GHRM. Second, an empirical study of three companies was conducted. The empirical part of this thesis is presented in the form of three cases of companies in different stages of forming GHRM. The data for these cases was gathered through interviews with employees, and further processed using qualitative content analysis. Afterwards, the theory of planned behaviour combined with ability-motivation-opportunity theory was used for interpreting the data. This study distinguishes three approaches to GHRM for encouraging employees’ pro-environmental behaviour: the bottom-up approach, the official GHRM practices approach, and the strategic GHRM approach. These approaches are defined by an organization’s position and the actions it has undertaken towards examining employees’ pro-environmental behaviour through GHRM. Organizational participation, managerial participation, and rising environmental awareness were identified as the most essential GHRM practices for enhancing employees’ pro-environmental behaviour. Individual-level factors are also significant for the formation of such behaviour in the organization, and they refer to consciousness and personal pro-environmental attitudes and beliefs. In addition, external cultural factors affect employees’ pro-environmental behaviour. In the Russian cultural context, mistrust in the recycling and waste disposal system was identified as a significant affective factor