Date of Award
8-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Psychology
Committee Chair/Advisor
Robert R. Sinclair
Committee Member
Patrick Rosopa
Committee Member
Marissa Shuffler
Committee Member
Tom Britt
Abstract
Going green at the organizational level does not automatically produce a shared sustainability climate among employees. How individual perceptions of organizational sustainability support form, and under what signal conditions they converge, has been theorized but rarely tested experimentally. The present study examined these questions using a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial vignette experiment (N = 332) with full-time employed adults, manipulating organizational sustainability signal strength (strong vs. weak), team-level sustainability signal strength (strong vs. weak), and team functional context (operations vs. analytics). Two large main effects emerged. Organizational signal strength produced a large effect on Perceived Organizational Sustainability Climate (POSC; ηp² = .355), and team-level signal strength produced the largest effect in the study (ηp² = .557). The two signals combined additively; the Organizational Signal × Team Signal interaction was not significant (ηp² = .006). Participants exposed to strong signals at both levels reported the highest POSC (M = 6.56), participants exposed to weak signals at both levels the lowest (M = 2.53), and the two mixed configurations fell between these poles, with the proximal team signal outweighing the distal organizational signal under cross-level conflict (M = 5.12 vs. M = 4.30). Functional context produced a small main effect favoring operations teams but did not moderate either signal effect. Exploratory convergence analyses indicated that congruent signal configurations produced lower within-condition dispersion and higher within-team agreement than incongruent configurations. These findings provide causal evidence that POSC forms through the additive integration of organizational and team-level cues, with proximal cues weighted more heavily, and suggest that cross-level congruence relates to sharedness rather than the level of climate perceptions.
Recommended Citation
Pool, Meredith, "Beyond Going Green: A Multilevel Examination of Sustainability Climate Formation" (2026). All Dissertations. 4303.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/4303
Author ORCID Identifier
0009-0006-6344-0507