Restraints and enablers of green initiative-taking among hospitality employees: a mixed-methods approach

Green initiative-taking, an employee’s self-starting opportunity-seeking action to improve environmental performance is a desirable outcome of organizations’ green policies. Given prior inattention to this area of study, it is unclear what fosters green initiative-taking, and why. This study attempts to answer these questions using a mixed-methods approach. First, an exploratory qualitative study was conducted. Green human resource management, eco-silence, supervisor bottom-line mentality, and co-worker voice emerged as the major themes of employees’ experiences when seeking to engage in green initiative-taking. Second, building on social information processing and social learning theories, a quantitative study proposes a conceptual model of the inter-relationships between the themes that emerged from the first study. Results from a multinational multisource time-lagged quantitative study support most of the hypotheses and shed light on avenues for future research. It suggests that supervisor bottom-line mentality inhibiting green initiative-taking might be standard procedure bottom-line mentality rather than profit bottom-line mentality. Post-hoc, to enhance the study’s applicability, a fuzzy-set analysis was conducted to offer managers the configurations that best yield green initiative-taking among hospitality employees.