Introduction
As we need to come up with new and innovative ways to tackling the emissions of our organisations, we need to encourage employee creativity. What makes people think in these new green innovative ways? What makes them come up with the new ideas that will change the future of our work and workplaces?
The study
The research paper by Chen et al. (2015) looked at how a shared green vision by an organisation can lead to the employees expressing green creativity in their work. They believe that “a shared vision can express the collective goals and aspirations of an organization that direct members to the developmental path for the organization’s future “. They also hypothesize that green self-efficacy and green mindfulness can mediate this relationship. Green self-efficacy is the idea that employees believe that they as an organisation will be able to achieve their environmental sustainability goals and aspirations. They introduce the idea of green mindfulness as a state of awareness of the context and content of environmental knowledge.
What did they find?
They found that green shared vision positively influences green mindfulness, green self-efficacy, and green creativity. They found that green self-efficacy, and green creativity partially mediated the green creativity in their sample. It means that green shared vision can not only positively affect green creativity in a direct way, but also indirectly via green mindfulness and green self-efficacy. Thus, companies have to increase their green shared vision, green mindfulness, and green self-efficacy to enhance their green creativity.
What does this mean?
This research shows that organisations should increase their green shared vision, green mindfulness, and green self-efficacy to enhance the green creativity of their employees and lead them to be more proactive in thinking about new environmentally friendly ways of working. This might take the shape of communication and workshops that include more employees in the shared vision of the organisations future.