Going Green Together: Effects of Green Transformational Leadership on Employee Green Behaviour and Environmental Performance in the Saudi Food Industry

Abstract

Over the last few decades, environmental impacts have been a major concern not only for policymakers but also for scholars and leaders of organisations. The leadership of organisations can drive the green behaviour of their employees, thus driving the overall green performance of enterprises. In this research, we examined the direct influence of green transformational leadership (GTFL) on the environmental performance of food organisations and the indirect influence via green behaviour of employees. More specifically, we have examined the mediating effect of employee green behaviour, whether task-related or pro-environmental behaviour, on the association between GTFL and environmental performance. For this purpose, we adopted a pre-tested research instrument for data collection from 1050 employees in different food enterprises across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). We have used Amos structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the direct and indirect effects of GTFL. The results confirmed a positive significant influence of GTFL on both dimensions of green behaviour, i.e., task-related and pro-environmental behaviour, and on environmental performance. The results showed a partial mediating effect of task-related behaviour in the link between GTFL and environmental performance, whereas pro-environmental behaviour has a perfect mediation effect. The results highlight the dynamic role of pro-environmental behaviour in affecting the above link and send a crucial message to leaders in the food industry about prioritizing pro-environmental behaviour when selecting and recruiting new employees. Additionally, development programs should be conducted to enhance the pro-environmental behaviours among employees.

Transformational leadership, job engagement, and championing behavior: assessing the mediating role of role clarity

“…Our research identifies that TFL leads to positive employee outcomes due to various underlying mechanisms (Ng, 2017; Gui et al , 2020). Job resources such as task-related behavior mediated the relationship between TFL and performance (Sobaih et al , 2022). Based on COR theory, transformational leaders use their resources to develop job resources, i.e.…”

Promoting green employee behaviour from the lens of green transformational leadership

“…For enhancing the human resource capabilities, both managerial and employee aspects need to be considered while incorporating the green environment (Wood et al ., 2021). Green transformational leadership acts as an imperative supportive factor in the green environment in the organisation and boosts various outcomes such as green motivation, green engagement and green performance (Sobaih et al ., 2022; Tosun et al ., 2022; Zhang et al ., 2021; Li et al ., 2020). Such recent green outcome studies mostly considered the employee orientation and limited with employee responses.…”

Does Spiritual Leadership Influence Hotel Employees’ Voluntary Eco-Friendly Behavior? The Role of Harmonious Green Passion and Nature Connectedness

“…It is interesting to note that leaders, to a certain extent, determine how effective environmental programs are. Previous research has demonstrated the importance of leadership in the adoption of employee eco-friendly behavior initiatives, such as transformational leadership (Sun et al,2022;Tosun et al,2022;Sobaih et al,2022), ethical leadership (Saleem et al,2020Wood et al,2021Islam et al,2020); servant leadership (Tuan, 2020;Faraz et al,2021;Ying et al2020) and empowering leadership (Jiang et al, 2019). Except for a handful of recent leadership studies, there has been a minimal study on the function of spiritual leadership in employee voluntary eco-friendly behaviors (Afsar, 2016), particularly in the tourism industry.…”