Antecedents of sustainable working among Finnish employees in light of the ability–motivation–opportunity framework

The role of employees in the green transition in their workplaces is attracting increasing academic interest. This paper examines the individual and organizational determinants of employee green behaviour (EGB) using the classical ability–motivation–opportunity (AMO) behavioural model as a theoretical framework. The study draws on a large and statistically representative survey sample of 5,742 Finnish employees. The results of the ordinal logistic regression models show that, of the factors included in the models, employee motivation, and especially the opportunity to influence one’s work, had a strong positive association with the activity of employees to change their key working practices and methods to be more ecologically sustainable. Adding organizational factors – the extent to which ecological sustainability is integrated into workplace strategy or as part of internal workplace interaction and supervisor support – to the model increased the explanatory power in a statistically significant way, although only by one percentage point. The findings suggest that increasing self-direction and autonomy at work could be an important means of promoting EGB and the ecological sustainability of organizations in many industries – with the partial exception of fossil-intensive industries, where the focus obviously should be placed on system-level changes to a greater degree.