When and why job-insecure flight attendants are reluctant to behave pro-environmentally

ABSTRACT

As firms consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in establishing a corporate strategy and allocating capital investment, environmental sustainability is deemed increasingly important in the travel and tourism sector. In line with this trend, we aim to identify the work stressors that affect employees’ pro-environmental behavior (PEB). Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, we propose that employees’ perception of job insecurity serves as a major job stressor hindering task-related and proactive PEB. We further predict that interpersonal stressors exacerbate the negative effect of job insecurity on PEB through decreased work engagement. To test these propositions, we administer two-wave surveys three months apart to 222 South Korean flight attendants. While we observed no direct relationship between job insecurity and task-related and proactive PEB, job insecurity had a significant indirect effect on these two forms of PEB through work engagement. The deleterious effects of job insecurity on work engagement and the two forms of PEB were aggravated when flight attendants reported high levels of supervisor incivility.

KEYWORDS:

• ESG
• environmental sustainability
• pro-environmental behavior
• travel and tourism sector
• flight attendants
• job insecurity
• work engagement
• supervisor incivility
• coworker incivility
• COR theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

The authors confirm that the study was granted exemption by the research ethics committees of the universities with which they are affiliated because the study belonged to Exempt Category 2: Research involving the use of educational tests (cognitive, diagnostic, aptitude, achievement), survey procedures, interview procedures or observation of public behavior, unless: (a) information obtained is recorded in such a manner that human subjects can be identified, directly, or through identifiers linked to the subjects; and (b) any disclosure of the human subjects’ responses outside the research could reasonably place the subjects at risk for criminal or civil liability or be damaging to the subjects’ financial standing, employability, or reputation. The authors certify that the study was performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Notes

1. As shown in Table 1, except for the correlation between age and years in the current job, all other correlations were below .50. However, the correlation between two interaction terms (i.e. job insecurity x supervisor incivility and job insecurity x coworker incivility) was .78. To reduce this multi-collinearity and avoid the distortion of results, we used mean-centering for these variables (Hair et al., 2018). After mean-centering, this correlation has decreased to .58.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-202300000001715).