Reducing carbon emissions through employee participation: evidence from Australia

• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Author: Raymond Markey,Chris F. Wright,Martin O'Brien,Joseph McIvor
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12238
• Date: 01 January 2019

Reducing carbon emissions through

employee participation: evidence from

Australia

Raymond Markey, Joseph McIvor,

Martin O’Brien and Chris F. Wright

ABSTRACT

Based on a survey of 682 Australian organisations, we find that employee participa-

tion influences organisations’behaviours to reduce carbon emissions. Representative

forms of participation and mechanisms dedicated specifically to environmental man-

agement are particularly important. Utilisation of a range of forms of participation is

also associated with a broader suite of emission reduction activities.

1 INTRODUCTION

Organisations are a key contributor to environmental degradation, particularly to an-

thropogenic climate change (Renwick et al., 2016). If the challenges of climate change

and the transition to lower carbon economies are to be addressed, it is critical that

organisations act to reduce their carbon emissions. Because employees are charged

with implementing organisations’emissions reduction programmes, their effective-

ness is dependent upon employee cooperation. Furthermore, these changes are likely

to affect work practices, skills and employee relations, so that employees will neces-

sarily have an interest in these programmes, irrespective of their personal commit-

ment to carbon abatement. In this context, ‘green’or ‘sustainable’human resource

management is an emerging area of research.

The role of employees need not be restricted to complying with management-

designed programmes. Employees and their representatives also have the potential

to contribute to the design of emissions reduction opportunities in the workplace.

The potential for employee knowledge and ideas to contribute to environmental man-

agement has been indicated in a number of studies (Boiral, 2002; Del Brio et al., 2007;

Hunton-Clarke et al., 2002; Kitazawa and Sarkis, 2000; Remmen and Lorentzen,

2000; Rothenberg, 2003). This research shows that employee knowledge is likely to

be important in identifying and implementing carbon reduction measures in the work-

place. This extends beyond the technical knowledge of specialist environmental

❒Raymond Markey, Centre for Workforce Futures, Faculty of Business and Economics, Macquarie

University, Sydney, New South Wales Australia, Joseph McIvor, Centre for Workforce Futures, Faculty

of Business and Economics, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales Australia, Martin

O’Brien, Sydney Business School, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales Australia

and Chris F. Wright, Work and Organisational Studies, University of Sydney Business School,

University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales Australia. Correspondence should be addressed to

Emeritus Professor Raymond Markey, Centre for Workforce Futures, Faculty of Business and

Economics, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. E-mail: ray.markey@mq.edu.au

Industrial Relations Journal 50:1, 57–83

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

employees to include knowledge of work processes and interactions within the

organisation possessed by all employees (Rothenberg, 2003).

Employee participation represents a critical means for tapping this employee

knowledge within organisations (Boiral, 2002). Renwick et al. (2016) review of green

HRM literature found strong support for employee involvement or participation

improving outcomes of environmental management systems and evidence for

employees themselves motivating organisations to address environmental issues.

Engagement and empowerment of employees in the environmental sphere of manage-

ment and development of a workplace culture supporting environmental manage-

ment were identified as core processes enabled by employee participation, in

addition to tapping employees’tacit knowledge (Renwick et al., 2016). This potential

for employee participation in improving environmental management at the

organisational level includes representative forms of participation—union and non-

union (Jackson et al., 2011; Markey et al., 2016; Renwick et al., 2016).

However, research on the role and initiative of employees in reducing carbon

emissions remains relatively limited in a number of important ways. Only a limited

number of studies in the green HRM literature have focused specifically on reducing

carbon emissions. The range of forms of employee participation studied is also an

important limitation in the literature. Research remains underdeveloped in the area

of representative employee participation. Moreover, while there is a rich case study

literature in green HRM (see next section), broader studies in this area using larger

sample sizes are rare (though see Del Brio et al., 2007).

This article addresses these gaps in the literature. It examines the participation of

employees in emissions reduction and decision-making at the organisational or work-

place level through a large-scale survey. We seek to establish the effect of employee

participation on organisations’propensity to engage in emissions reduction activities,

the impact of different mechanisms for participation and the extent to which combin-

ing participation mechanisms enhances their effect on emissions reduction. We thus

have three research questions:

1. How are specific participation mechanisms related to the propensity of organi-

sations to engage in specific emissions reduction behaviours?

2. How are specific participation mechanisms related to the breadth of organisa-

tions’emissions reducing behaviours?

3. How does the breadth of participation mechanisms relate to the breadth of

organisations’emissions reducing behaviours?

The following section reviews the literature on employee involvement and partici-

pation (EIP), with a focus on its potential role in climate mitigation. We then discuss

our method, which utilises a survey of 682 Australian organisations regarding their

emissions reduction behaviours and the role of employee participation in this. We

use econometric modelling to measure the degree and nature of the effect of employee

participation on organisations’propensity to engage in behaviours related to carbon

emissions reduction. Finally, we discuss the implications of our research.

2 THE ROLE OF WORKERS AND THEIR REPRESENTATIVES IN

ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE

Employee involvement and participation generically describes a range of practices

known by different labels, including employee ‘voice’,‘empowerment’or

58 Raymond Markey, Joseph McIvor, Martin O’Brien and Chris F. Wright

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd