The Impact Of Monetary Incentive And Pro-environmental Incentive On Employee Pro-environmental Behavior

Considering that employee pro-environmental behavior has substantial benefits for companies,such as improving their environmental performance,reducing costs,and enhancing corporate image,some companies have begun to pay attention to the management of employee pro-environmental behaviour.Incentive mechanism is an important tool for companies to management employee behavior,however there are few empirical studies focusing on the relationship between incentives and employee pro-environmental behavior.Based on the practice of some companies,this paper puts forward the concept of pro-environmental incentive,which associates employee daily pro-environmental behavior in the work context with additional environmental benefits.It is realized by means of planting trees in the desert and restoring grasslands,et al.,which can make a real contribution to the improvement of the natural environment.Through a laboratory experiment,this paper compares the effects of traditional monetary incentive and proenvironmental incentive on employee pro-environmental behavior,meanwhile the moderating role of employees’ pro-environmental self-accountability is considered.The results show that compared with no incentives,the introduction of both monetary incentive and pro-environmental incentive can promote employee pro-environmental behavior,and employees with weaker pro-environmental self-accountability are more sensitive to the introduction of those two incentives.Moreover,for employees with weaker pro-environmental self-accountability,monetary incentive performs significantly better than pro-environmental incentive.While for employees with stronger pro-environmental self-accountability,there is no significant difference between the effect of pro-environmental incentive and monetary incentive.This means that pro-environmental incentive can achieve similar effects as monetary incentive,however this requires strong pro-environmental self-accountability among employees.In supplementary analysis,the impact of behavioural cost on the effects of both incentives is analysed.The results show that when behavioural cost is low,there is no significant difference between the effect of pro-environmental incentive and monetary incentive.While when behavioural cost increases to a certain level,the effect of proenvironmental incentive is significantly lower than that of monetary incentive.This implies that the effect of pro-environmental incentive is more sensitive to the increase of behavioural cost.Since the cost to implement pro-environmental incentive is lower than that of monetary incentive,it is advisable for companies to promote employee proenvironmental self-accountability through ways like green training and green culture to cooperate with the use of pro-environmental incentive.Moreover,the behavioural cost for employees to behave environmentally should be controlled by means of improving facilities inside companies,so that pro-environmental incentive can be used effectively.Compared with previous studies,there are two major contributions of this paper.Firstly,we propose the concept of pro-environmental incentive,which is a totally new type of non-monetary incentive for companies.Secondly,this paper contributes to the enrichment of research on how to guide employees to behave in accordance with corporate social responsibility in the field of management accounting.