Ambidextrous leadership and green attitude foster organizational citizenship behavior for the environment through organizational commitment

Abstract

This study investigates the determinants of Organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE) in the retail sector, focusing on minimarkets in an emerging-economy context where empirical evidence remains scarce. It integrates employees’ green attitude and ambidextrous leadership as antecedents of OCBE, with organizational commitment as a mediator and organizational culture as a contextual moderator. Data were collected from 473 minimarket supervisors in Jakarta who are directly responsible for implementing plastic bag reduction policies. Structural equation modeling with partial least squares was employed to test the proposed relationships. The study finds that ambidextrous leadership and green attitude positively influence OCBE, with statistically significant but relatively small direct effects. Organizational commitment significantly mediates these relationships, while organizational culture does not moderate the proposed paths, suggesting that general organizational culture may not be sufficiently specific to amplify OCBE, which may reflect the use of general (non-environment-specific) cultural measures. The novelty of this study lies in its integrated attitudinal–leadership–commitment model of OCBE and its empirical focus on minimarket supervisors in an emerging-economy retail context, where evidence on OCBE is still limited. By examining plastic bag reduction initiatives, the research shows that even in highly standardized retail operations, ambidextrous leadership and green attitudes can foster OCBE primarily through organizational commitment, while the nonsignificant moderating role of organizational culture cautions that a general organizational culture may be insufficiently specific to strengthen employee environmental citizenship. This study suggests that retail managers should emphasize ambidextrous leadership and foster green attitudes among employees while strengthening organizational commitment to enhance pro-environmental behaviors. The findings underscore that organizational culture alone may not be sufficient as a moderating factor in driving OCBE.