The influence of public servants’ perceived formalism and organizational environmental strategy on green behavior in the workplace

Abstract

This study explored the influence of public servants’ green attitude, green behavior inten-tion, organization environmental strategy, green lifestyle, and formalism on green behavior. For Taiwan’s government agencies, environmental protection and sustainable development issues must be inculcated into government organizations and deeply ingrained into the mindset of civil serv-ants. In particular, this research incorporates the concept of ‘formalism’ proposed by Riggs in administrative ecology. Exploration of the influence of civil servants’ cognition of formalism on green behavior has not been explored in any previous studies. This study collected 308 valid public servants who worked in the public sector in Taiwan and used Lisrel and SEM to justify the hypotheses explored. The results showed that civil servants’ green attitude positively affected green intention, as well as the fact that green behavior intention, organization environmental strategy, and green lifestyle positively affected green behavior. The current study also confirmed that formalism nega-tively affected green behavior. Formalism is considered to be an important attribute of developing administration, and it is also considered to be a resistance to the adoption of administrative inno-vation. This study first confirmed the negative impact of formalism on the green behavior of civil servants.