The effect of paternalistic leadership on employee green behavior: the mediating role of organization-based self-esteem

Employee green behavior is the key to achieving corporate environmental management goals and promoting sustainable development of enterprises. Based on the social exchange theory (SET), the study innovatively introduces organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) as a mediating variable to explore the mechanism of paternalistic leadership on employee green behavior (EGB), and simultaneously using power distance (PD) as a moderating variable to moderate the relationship between organization-based self-esteem and employee green behavior. We collected data from 305 employees at four resource-based enterprises in Jiangsu and Shanghai regions via offline survey method and used Smart-PLS 3.0 software to analyze the data and PLS-SEM method to support our model. Authoritarian leadership (AL) and benevolent leadership (BL) not only affect employee green behavior, but also affects employee organization-based self-esteem, while employee organization-based self-esteem also affects employee green behavior. This study concluded that authoritarian leadership is negatively related with employee green behavior and organization-based self-esteem plays a mediating role between authoritarian leadership and employee green behavior. Benevolent leadership is positively related with employee green behavior and organization-based self-esteem plays a mediating role between benevolent leadership and employee green behavior. In addition, power distance is positively moderates the relationship between organization-based self-esteem and employee green behavior. This study enriched the research results of paternalistic leadership, made up for the shortcomings in the field of employee green behavior research and provided reference and inspiration for future research on the relationship between paternalistic leadership and employee green behavior.