Encouraging Pro-Environmental Behaviour: Affordances and Institutional Logics in IS-enabled Organisational Sustainability Transformations

While many studies have addressed encouraging employees’ pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) in the workplace, the roles of structures and institutions have received little attention and thus remain unclear. We draw on the concept of affordances as being enacted and embedded in institutional logics, which provide a frame of reference for individual and organisational behaviours. Given our emphasis on organisational sustainability transformations, we explain how organisations can encourage their employees to act pro-environmentally in the workplace with the help of green information systems (Green IS). We address technological, organisational, and human factors that strengthen PEB. Thus, we respond to the call to bring together institutional logics and affordance theory. We present preliminary findings of 55 semi structured interviews with informants from 20 companies, along with internal and external documents. This allows us to develop a pro-environmental corporate logic, which guides employees’ PEB in our case companies. These preliminary findings allow us to develop a research agenda on the interplay of this institutional logic and motivational affordances. We conclude with an outlook on how to tackle the emerging research questions.