A preponderance of prior studies documenting the empirical association between Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) and Employee Green Behavior (EGB) suffers from limitations on their research design, which question the internal validity of this presumed cause-and-effect linkage. First, virtually all studies rely on perceptual measures of EGB, which are potentially biased particularly when self-reported by the employees themselves. Second, although it is often argued that GHRM effects are transmitted through changes in employees’ internal motivation, cross-sectional designs fail to assess the direction and the evolution of this process. We hypothesized that, in emerging markets with high rates of unemployment and precarious employment, GHRM effects stem at least partly from the external motivation to comply with new job obligations and not only from the internal motivation triggered by new values. A total of 160 workers of a logistics company in an emerging market participated in a four-wave quasi-experiment. Half of them located in the south distribution center were assigned to the control group, whereas the half in the north center was assigned to the treatment group. We gathered perceptual and non-perceptual measures of EGB (e.g., CO2 emissions) over a period of 12 months with a separation of four months between waves. A mixed (i.e., measurement waves nested in participants) linear model demonstrated statistically significant GHRM effects on EGB measures. However, GHRM effects were not fully mediated by employee perceptions, but had direct effects on EGB, particularly among older workers who possibly perceived few employment alternatives.
