title: Age and Employee Green Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis.
abstract: Recent economic and societal developments have led to an increasing emphasis on organizational environmental performance. At the same time, demographic trends are resulting in increasingly aging labor forces in many industrialized nations. Commonly held stereotypes suggest that older workers are less likely to be environmentally responsible than younger workers. To evaluate the degree to which such age differences are present, we meta-analyzed 132 independent correlations and 336 d-values based on 4676 professional workers from 22 samples in 11 countries. Contrary to popular stereotypes, age showed small positive relationships with pro-environmental behaviors, suggesting that older adults engaged in these workplace behaviors slightly more frequently. Relationships with age appeared to be linear for overall, Conserving, Avoiding Harm, and Taking Initiative pro-environmental behaviors, but non-linear trends were observed for Transforming and Influencing Others behaviors.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN, USA.
authors.forename: Brenton M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Wiernik
authors.affiliation: Department of Management, Baruch College, City University of New York New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dilchert
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN, USA.
authors.forename: Deniz S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Ones
keywords: age differences; employee green behaviors; environmental sustainability at work; individual environmental performance; sustainability; workplace pro-environmental behaviors