Encouraging Sustainable Pro-Environmental Behavior in Organizations Using Information Systems
Final Report Abstract
The project addressed the following research question: How can organizations encourage their employees to act pro-environmentally in the workplace? As digital technologies have permeated every aspect of our daily lives, they offer great potential for promoting pro-environmental behavior (PEB), especially in the workplace. Yet we know little about how to actually promote PEB with information systems (IS) in the workplace. A particular challenge is that the use of technology depends not only on technological features, but also on the usage behavior of others and organizational goals. Thus, our interdisciplinary project integrated technological, human, and organizational factors to understand how to encourage employee PEB by leveraging the motivating potentials of IS. We contributed to calls for more in-depth and methodologically diverse research on institutional logics and affordance theory and the integration of both theories to better understand IS-enabled organizational sustainability transformations. Based on rich data from interviews, documents, and observations at our partner companies Audi and Symrise, as well as experiments, we designed different affordances in gamified IS artifacts. Using feedback mechanisms to promote the use of a sustainable web search engine, we showed that gamified emotional or competitive feedback effectively supported the normative motives and substantially increased PEB. Building on these findings, we conducted a second experiment to investigate how individual tailoring of personal motives and feedback increases PEB, showing that tailored feedback can increase PEB even further. The experiments demonstrate that gamification and tailored feedback are effective IS-enabled ways for making environmental impact salient to attenuate the attitude-behavior gap in organizational and societal contexts. Additionally, we found that a sustainability shift in a company requires balancing and blending mechanisms to change the dominant institutional logic to incorporating sustainability. Particularly, giving employees leeway has two valuable effects: First, employees can contribute their personal expertise by launching sustainability initiatives independently. Second, giving employees leeway and support facilitates sustainability as individual responsibility and allows for a deep integration of sustainability within the corporate values. Sustainability is a grand challenge of our time and managers often cannot provide perfect central solutions. But they do not have to. Supporting individual employees can create a reinforcing dynamic. Thus, managers should focus on providing the necessary leeway, resources, and incentives to empower employees that aim at greening their organization. Overall, our research setting and design delivers rare insights into IS-enabled organizational sustainability and provides two key findings. First, informating and automating Green IS affordances positively affect sustainability at the individual and firm level and second, organizational sustainability benefits from integrating individual knowledge and decentralizing responsibilities to the extent possible to more operational levels.
Publications
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2016. “The role of motivational affordances and institutional logics in IS-enabled organizational sustainability transformations - A research agenda.” Proceedings of the SIGGreen Pre-ICIS 2016 Workshop, Dublin (Ireland)
Schick, A., Henkel, C., Kranz, J. & Fiedler, M.
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2017. “Greening the organization: An institutional logics approach towards corporate pro-environmentalism.” Proceedings of the British Academy of Management Conference, Warwick, UK
Seidler, A., Henkel, C., Fiedler, M. and Kranz, J.
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2017. “How to become a sustainability leader? The role of IS affordances in enabling and triggering sustainability transformations.” Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Seoul (South Korea)
Henkel, C., Seidler, A., Kranz, J., and Fiedler, M.
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2018. “Do Environmental Management Systems Sustainably Improve Environmental Performance? – A Panel Data Analysis of the Global 500 Organizations.” SIGGreen Pre-ICIS 2018 Workshop, San Francisco (USA)
Henkel, C, Mager, S., and Kranz, J.
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2018. “Encouraging Pro-Environmental Behavior: Affordances and Institutional Logics in IS-enabled Organisational Sustainability Transformations.” Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Information Systems, Portsmouth, UK
Seidler, A., Henkel, C., Fiedler, M. and Kranz, J.
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2019. “How to Nudge Pro-Environmental Behaviour: An Experimental Study”. Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Stockholm (Sweden)
Henkel, C., Seidler, A., Kranz, J., and Fiedler, M.
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(2020). ”Promoting Eco-Sustainable Behavior with Gamification : An Experimental Study Promoting Eco-Sustainable Behavior with Gamification : An Experimental Study on the Alignment of Competing Goals.” Proceedings of the 41th International Conference on Information Systems 2020, Hyderabad (India)
Seidler, A.-R., Henkel, C., Fiedler, M., Kranz, J., Ixmeier, A., & Strunk, K. S.
