Hotel employees’ pro-environmental behavior: a functionalist approach to positive moral psychology

Abstract The pro-environmental behavior of employees is crucial in executing organizational green policies, aligning their actions with the company’s environmental goals. Since such behavior is inherently tied to moral consciousness, moral factors are increasingly incorporated into pro-environmental behavior research. The functionalist perspective of moral behavior identifies four psychological mechanisms: intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup levels. Research on the connection between moral emotions and behavior remains limited. Therefore, this research explores the functionalist perspective of moral psychology with the objectives of elucidating how corporate environmental responsibility (CER) operates as an intragroup factor, environment-specific servant leadership (ESSL) serves as an interpersonal factor, and environmental knowledge (EK) functions as a moderating intrapersonal mechanism that influences pro-environmental behaviors (PEB). Moral elevation (ME) is examined as a mediator in the relationship between CER and ESSL, and their combined impact on PEB. Additionally, EK is assessed as a moderator between ME and PEB. The study involved 335 hotel employees in scenario-based experiments with 2 × 2 scenarios of high and low CER and ESSL. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) in SPSS and AMOS. Findings reveal that between the intra-group and the interpersonal mechanisms (CER and ESSL), only ESSL significantly and positively influences ME, highlighting the importance of interpersonal mechanisms in moral psychology, while the intrapersonal mechanism, EK, did not moderate the ME-PEB relationship. This study contributes to moral psychology literature by dissecting the interplay between social and intrapersonal mechanisms in shaping moral behavioral intentions.