GROW

The GROW network engages with a topic that is one of the most pressing of our age - climate change. The science of climate change may still be contested, however the need for societies to achieve greater sustainability in the face of diminishing resources and rising populations is much less controversial.  To this end, encouraging individuals to engage in environmentally sustainablebehaviors attracts an ever-increasing level of media, public, policy and research interest.This network differs from the main-stream by asking not how we increase pro-environmental behaviours in the home, but rather asking how we can encourage individual employees to act in more sustainable ways at work (often where there is little obvious direct benefit to the employee).  The network brings a multi-disciplinary and international lens to the problem – drawing together academics, industrialists and policy-makers interested in this issue.

Green Behaviour in the Workplace

The contribution of non-domestic sectors (e.g., industry, service sector, public sector) to a nation’s overall carbon emissions, power consumption, waste generation and water usage is highly significant.  Increasing the sustainability and resource efficiency of these sectors will be critical in helping nations to achieve their various international obligations and pledges regarding environmental impact.

A key part of this effort will involve encouraging ordinary workers to change the way they act in the workplace by adopting more sustainable working practices.  However, our current understanding of how to achieve this  is limited.  Although psychologists already know a little about how to answer this question, much of the current literature and techniques are aimed at encouraging 'green' behaviour within the domestic sector.  There is a real need to further explore how to adopt these interventions and integrate related aspects of environmental, social and organizational psychology to help businesses drive down their environmental impact.

Higher-level organizational policies, new production techniques, buildings and more-efficient technologies all have important roles to play too.  Often the interactions that individuals have with technologies or buildings can radically alter how efficiently they operate and consequently their environmental impact. Likewise building design or workspace layout can encourage employees to recycle more, and the default settings on pieces of technology can prompt workers to use low energy settings.  Similarly, sustainable organizational policies can be developed and employed, but in isolation of strategies and techniques to win over and encourage employees on the ground to adopt new working practices, they can fail to achieve their environmental aims. Understanding human behaviour and interactions is intimately related to realising the potential of more efficient technology, building design, production processes and work systems. 

Our Network

The network sets out to try to offer suggestions as to how employees can be encouraged to act in more sustainable ways.  Complex problems are often an inter-related mix of behavioural, technological, organizational and societal factors and this is a prime example.  The GROW network aims to build collaboration across social and organizational psychology, management, engineering, architecture and environmental science disciplines, to develop truly integrated responses.  The network will also be actively seeking contributions and challenges from policy-makers and the industrial sector.  We meet together for the first time at our inaugural conference in Leeds in January 2011.