Is Internal Communication a “Bet on the Right Horse” on the Path for Promoting Employees' Eco-Friendly Behavior?: The Mediator Role of Organizational Green Culture

Introduction

Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) orientations consist of a key developmental area for modern organizations with different kinds of perspectives and aims. Indeed, current worldwide economic scenarios are heavily pressured by a post-covid and high inflation rates period, bringing renewed stresses for organizational development under the sustainability compromise. Such a setting pushes managers to find new approaches and apply effective practices aiming at the enhancement of sustainability in organizations, in regard to energy consumption, ecological protection, digital internal procedures for supporting paper-free management systems, and sustainable internal policies for human resources at large.

The commitment towards the development of internal organizational policies with the SDGs alignment, thus, clearly invites the adoption of environmentally friendly actions guided towards the workers, in which the role of Internal Communication (IC) policies and practices should be discussed. Specifically, IC may have a very critical role in regard to how people are well aligned with internal policies aiming at the adoption of sustainable management practices. IC has the ability of strategically manage relationships and interactions within an organization with strong alignment with organization’s goals and objectives through a systematic process of information management (Verghese, 2017), by stimulating the organization’s members to work together, cooperate and interpret the organization’s ever-changing needs and activities (Kreps, 1995). The area can bring actions aiming to inform the internal publics of the organization by creating flows of communication and information exchange in different directions to facilitate the production, circulation, and the management of information (Almeida, 2003), and consequently, supporting internal cohesion, shared knowledge and interaction within the organization. Thus, the functions of IC may very well assume a strategic role, by serving as a key reference source of values and cultural factors for employees, and by acting as a decisive element of organizations regarding integration, organizational change management or internal cohesion.

The impacts of IC are widely recognized both by researchers and by practitioners in what concerns people management and alignment with organization's goals and aims (Ruck & Welch, 2012; Ishtiaque & Habib, 2016; Men & Bowen, 2017; Dermol & Širca, 2018). Given the sense of urgency recently given to SDGs orientations, it seems relevant to develop a research attempt to establish the impact of IC on workers’ adherence to behaviors aligned with SDGs, such as eco-friendly behavior. This specific kind of behavior improves the organization’s environmental performance (Daily, Bishop & Govindarajulu, 2009), and therefore, seems quite relevant to follow the purpose of enhancing a firm’s ecological compromise. In addition, eco-friendly behavior should be seen as the result of a set of well-established strategically foreseen practices and can be defined as a voluntary and conscious protective behavior of the environment made by a person (Kim, Kim, Choi & Phetvaroon, 2019). In entrepreneurial contexts, this behavior should be interpreted in alignment with the global organizational orientations over this matter and resulting from a sense of knowledge shared by the workers.