Project Details
Projekt
Encouraging Sustainable Pro-Environmental Behavior in Organizations Using Information Systems
Subject Area
Accounting and Finance
Term
from 2016 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289192107
How can organizations encourage their employees to act pro-environmentally in the workplace? The DFG-funded project we started in July 2016, seeks to address this question by examining the role of information systems (IS) in increasing employees’ pro-environmental behavior (PEB). We know from literature that IS are entangled with human activity. Research in this tradition has focused on the interplay of human and material agency, but has downplayed the roles of structures and institutions. Therefore, our interdisciplinary project integrates technological, human, and organizational factors to augment the understanding about how to encourage employee PEB by leveraging the motivating potentials of IS. To date, only our project draws on the need for joint analysis of the direct and moderating effects of technical, human, and organizational aspects of PEB in organizations. We seek to address this gap by investigating the interactions between institutional logics, psychological dynamics, and IS affordances and how they influence the effectiveness of IS-based interventions.The investigation will contribute to theory in IS and organizational behavior. Particularly, we contribute to calls for more in-depth and methodological diverse research on institutional logics and affordance theory and the integration of both theories to better understand IS-enabled organizational sustainability transformations. Our project is guided by three research questions: (1) How do different IS affordances influence employee PEB and how are they actualized by employees? (2) How do IS affordances and institutional logics interplay to influence organizational sustainability transformations? (3) How and why do institutional logics change over time? Investigating these questions provides needed insights into the design and usage of gamified IS for employee PEB, influences of institutional logics on the effectiveness of gamified IS and the change dynamics of institutional logics.Based on the rich data we have already gathered from interviews, documents, and observations at our partner companies Audi and Symrise and a laboratory experiment, we designed different affordances in gamified IS artifacts (i.e. mobile apps) to examine their effectiveness in encouraging employee PEB in longitudinal field experiments. Building on usage data and interviews from the field experiments, we will apply a mixed-methods approach to investigate employees’ actualization of affordances. To unveil the impact of institutional logics on affordance actualization, we apply a self-developed scale to measure the dominant institutional logic(s) via large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys. Further interviews will unearth how balancing and blending mechanisms resulted in a change of the dominant institutional logic for PEB. Thus, our research setting and design provides the rare opportunity to examine IS-enabled organizational sustainability transformations over time in real work environments.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
