Given the environmental challenges facing organizations, there is an increasing interest in how to stimulate the green behavior of employees. This study focuses on how leaders foster green advocacy, a specific category of green behavior that refers to influencing others to demonstrate green behavior by sharing environmental knowledge and discussing environmental issues. Our study, using a sample of 363 employees of a Belgian grocery retail company, provides valuable insights on the complex role of leaders in stimulating green advocacy. The results reveal that environmentally‐specific transformational leadership is positively related to employees' green advocacy. Our results further provide insights into the underlying mechanisms explaining this relationship, as we find that environmentally‐specific transformational leadership is indirectly related to employees' green advocacy through environmental CSR and organizational environmental support. Finally, leadership integrity is found to positively moderate the direct as well as the indirect relationship between environmentally‐specific transformational leadership and green advocacy.

PurposeOrganizations implement corporate social responsibility (CSR) to act, or present themselves as, sustainable. Yet, CSR efforts by organizations can be negatively received by stakeholders. The increased skepticism by stakeholders toward organizations' CSR programs has led to a growing interest in the influence of CSR authenticity. The purpose of this study is to provide valuable insights into the complex role CSR authenticity plays in stimulating desirable employee attitudes and behaviors.Design/methodology/approachA sample of 482 employees working in the Belgian banking sector allows the authors to test this study’s theoretical model using structural equation modeling (SEM).FindingsEmpirical findings demonstrate that CSR authenticity positively relates to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Extending this notion, we find evidence for organizational identification to mediate the relationship between CSR authenticity and OCB. Further, this study highlights that organizational justice mediates the relationship between CSR authenticity and organizational identification. Finally, the importance of ethical leadership is underlined as a boundary condition to the relationship between CSR authenticity and OCB.Practical implicationsFor managers, this study provides insights into the importance of CSR authenticity in fostering positive employee outcomes. It offers guidance on how to incorporate CSR authentically, addressing the importance of the organization's core values and supervisors' alignment with these values.Originality/valueThis study distinguishes itself from existing micro-level research, which mainly focuses on employees' evaluation of the organization's attention to CSR, by investigating the outcomes of employees' perceptions of CSR authenticity. Previous research shows that perceptions of CSR authenticity produce positive outcomes among consumers, but that, so far, we know very little about which specific perceptions or behaviors it might elicit among employees. Furthermore, this study provides evidence for interlinkage between leadership, CSR and beneficial outcomes such as OCB, through the integration of ethical leadership behaviors.

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