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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1516658
Are Women More Likely to Engage in Extra Green Behaviors in the Workplace? Gender Differences in the Spillover Effect from Employee In-Role to Extra-Role Green Behavior
Provisionally accepted- Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
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With the growing importance of green development, organizational research pointed that employee green behavior is an important micro foundation to addressing the environmental challenge. While past studies have categorized the in-role and extra-role green behavior as two dimensions of employee green behavior from the job performance perspective, they have overlooked the potential interaction between the two types of green behavior. This oversight may hamper organizations' green efforts since deeper engagement in green behavior needs more psychological motivations compared to compliance with green management policies. According to cognitive consistency theory, this study explores employees' psychology reactions to in-role green behaviors, and how these psychological changes induce extra-role green behaviors. Data of 351 employees in China revealed a moderated mediation model. SPSS 25 and Smart PLS 3.0 were used to test the theoretical model. Results show that reflective moral attentiveness and person-organization fit mediate the spillover between in-role to extra-role green behavior. Moreover, these effects were moderated by employee gender: reflective moral attentiveness plays a more important role for women in the green behavior spillover process; conversely, in-role green behaviors lead to stronger person-organization fit for man than for woman.
Keywords: employee in-role green behavior, Employee extra-role green behavior, reflective moral attentiveness, person-organization fit, Gender difference
Received: 26 Oct 2024; Accepted: 11 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Jin, Xu and Khan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jiafei Jin, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.