Employee Green Behavior and Sustainability-Related Tensions in Teams

Research on employee green behavior (EGB) has garnered increasing attention as scholars seek to understand how employees can contribute to organizational greening. Despite considerable interest in the antecedents of EGB, the challenges and tensions that emerge as individuals engage in voluntary EGB remain underexplored. Drawing on survey data from 388 respondents across 74 teams, the results indicate that voluntary EGB is a major driver of tension salience within teams. Furthermore, we find that this relationship is moderated by the extent to which team colleagues encourage one another to engage in green behavior. These findings highlight the critical role of teams as the social context in which voluntary EGB occurs and suggest a task-conflict nature of sustainability-related tensions within teams. The pertinent question thus appears to be no longer whether employees are willing to engage but rather which green activities they should prioritize as they face resource constraints while striving toward a common goal.