When and Why Perceived Organizational Environmental Support Fails to Work: From a Congruence Perspective

Environmental responsibility has been increasingly emphasized in the management field. Perceived organizational environmental support is generally considered desirable within organizations. Nonetheless, both scholars and practitioners doubt that it is a panacea for enhancing employee green behavior (EGB), an important workplace behavior benefiting the environment and corporate sustainability. From a congruence perspective, this research explores when and why perceived organizational environmental support fails to increase EGB effectively. Drawing upon cue consistency theory and the corporate hypocrisy literature, we propose that perceived organizational environmental support backfires when it is incongruent with another critical cue signaling an organization's environmental stance - perceived supervisory environmental support (particularly when perceived organizational environmental support is higher than perceived supervisory environmental support). This is because the inconsistent signals of environmental support from the organization (in the form of policy commitment) and supervisor (in the form of supportive behaviors) arouse employees' perception of corporate hypocrisy, which in turn inhibits EGB. Both the scenario experiment results (Study 1) and the polynomial regression results of the field survey data (Study 2) support our hypotheses. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.