Cultural shift for pro-environmental behavioural change:developing and validating the Environmental Culture in Organisations (ECO) scale

Organisations are key to shaping individual pro-environmental actions. To drive substantial workplace pro-environmental behaviours among members, organisations must develop a coherent culture i.e., consistently foster environmental sustainability across various levels and day-to-day operations. Drawing on organisational culture theory, and predictors of workplace pro-environmental behaviours, we develop the Environmental Culture in Organisations (ECO) scale (25-item long version and 15-item short version) to assess an organisation's culture around environmental sustainability. Across four studies we: 1) theorised dimensions and developed and refined items through expert interviews; 2) determined that the ECO scale has a five-factor structure through factor analysis (n = 1272 UK adults); 3) confirmed ECO's factor structure in a new, pre-registered study (n = 1224 UK adults) and found evidence for its convergent, discriminant validity, and predictive validity; 4) found that ECO is positively predicted by organisational features such as employees' occupational roles (n = 604 participants). Our findings suggest that an organisation's environmental culture is comprised of five organisational features– leadership and management norms, co-worker or team norms, organisational policies, organisational values, and feasibility of action in employees' day-to-day job roles. And this resultant environmental culture has important implications for employees' workplace pro-environmental behaviours. ECO can chart a clear path to organisational interventions— using the ECO scale, researchers and practitioners can assess an organisation's current culture, and identify specific aspects of an organisation that can be intervened upon to drive members' pro-environmental behaviours.