Fly green: environmentally specific servant leadership and its impact on green performance outcomes

ABSTRACT

A careful examination of the pertinent literature denotes that no empirical study has tested the consequences of environmentally specific servant leadership (ESS) among cabin crew so far. This is surprising because the airline industry has long been at the forefront of green debate for its significant environmental problems (e.g. climate change, CO2 emission, and waste). With this realization, drawing on the stimulus-organism-response framework and social learning theory, our paper explores climate for green creativity (CGC) and green creativity (GC) as the serial mediators linking ESS to green recovery performance (GRP). Data came from cabin crew in major European low-cost carriers. The results from the PROCESS plug-in for statistical package for social sciences reveal that CGC or GC mediates the influence of ESS on GRP. More importantly, CGC and GC mediate the positive association between ESS and GRP in a sequential manner. The presence of ESS results in the establishment of the climate where cabin crew can offer novel green ideas and feedback that in turn enables them to display better GRP. Theoretical implications are discussed and implications for managers are given in the paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Airlines
• cabin crew
• climate for green creativity
• environmentally specific servant leadership
• environmental sustainability
• green performance

Acknowledgements

Data came from the second author’s master thesis and part of a larger project. The extended abstract of this paper was presented and published in the Conference of Managing Tourism across Continents (MTCON) in 2022.

Disclosure statement

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