A new perspective to promote organizational citizenship behaviour for the environment: The role of transformational leadership

Employees' spontaneous organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE) in the work-place is of great significance for enterprises' low-carbon transition. However, how such behavior can be promoted through leadership styles has not been considered. Therefore, this study established a model that explores how transformational leadership affects employees' OCBE from the perspective of the leader-member exchange relationship. With 215 superior-subordinate paired data, a structural equation model (SEM) was used to test the hypotheses. The results revealed four key findings. (1) A transformational leadership style can effectively promote employees' OCBE, but the four dimensions of transformational leadership have different influencing paths and strengths on OCBE. (2) Leaders' vision motivation directly inspires employees' OCBE, and the effect intensity is the largest among all dimensions. (3) Both leaders' individualized consideration and moral modeling promote OCBE indirectly through psychological ownership, and the effect of individualized consideration is greater than the effect of moral modeling. (4) Contrary to our expectations, leadership charm does not have any effect on OCBE. Finally, firm recommendations were proposed on how to facilitate employees' OCBE by transforming the leadership style, thus promoting the green and low-carbon development of enterprises. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.