We investigated the impact of environmental transformational leadership (ETL) on pro-environmental behavior (PEB) of employees in Kazakhstan. The study also examined the potential mediating effect of environmental awareness and green human resource management (GHRM) as a moderating effect, using the theory of planned behavior. An online cross-sectional survey was conducted with 268 Kazakh employees from private and public organizations. Structural equation modeling was used to test the theory-driven model. The results show that environmental leadership predicted employees’ PEB, environmental awareness mediated the relationship, and GHRM partially moderated the relationship. The results of bootstrapping tests reveal that environmental awareness played successive mediating roles in the link between ETL and PEBs, but the simple slope test did not support the moderating effect of GHRM. Environmental awareness and GHRM were identified as fundamental mechanisms that accounted for the connection between ETL and PEBs.

Purpose: In the current business environment, no organization is assured of survival without continuous innovation. Employees’ innovative behavior is critical to enhance the innovation of an organization. While most literature on innovative behavior has focused on employees in the private sector, the purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that affect innovative behaviors in the government sector. In particular, it examines how proactivity, leader-member exchange (LMX), and climate for innovation affect employees’ innovative behavior in the Korean government sector, which is generally characterized as highly hierarchical, structured, and formalized.Design/methodology/approach: The authors selected a sample of government employees in the Ministry of Education in Korea. Through the researchers’ contacts, ten government agencies agreed to recruit their employees to participate in the study. Data from 1,011 respondents were analyzed in two steps using structural equation modeling. First, to examine the construct validity of the measures, the authors examined the measurement model using the confirmatory factor analysis. Second, the interrelationships among the four variables were assessed. The hypothesized structural model was examined and compared to several alternative models to explore the best model fit to the data. The authors then examined the regression coefficients to determine the hypothesized relationships in the final structured model.Findings: The results revealed the following: proactivity and climate for innovation had positive relationships with innovative behavior; LMX had a positive relationship with proactivity although it did not have a direct relationship with innovative behavior; and organizational climate for innovation did not ensure proactivity of employees.Originality/value: The antecedents included in this research have been studied in relation to innovative behavior in several studies, but studies have called for further study. Few studies have examined innovative behavior in the public sector and they have examined innovation in the public sector which has mostly been focused on environmental factors surrounding government organizations or policy choices of government leaders while ignoring the individual traits of public workers, relational dynamics among people, and the cultural aspects of the organizations. This study investigated the interrelationships among the antecedents in the process of impacting innovative behavior in the public sector in Korea. In addition, little research has examined the antecedents of innovative behavior together. This study expands our knowledge of the roles and interrelationships of proactivity, LMX, and organizational climate for innovation as they relate to innovative behavior.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the perceived authentic leadership of supervisors and employees’ core self-evaluations on their organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and to examine the role of psychological empowerment as a partial mediator of those relationships.Design/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional survey was used to obtain individual perceptions from employees working in one of the biggest companies in Korea. Data from 374 samples was analyzed. Construct validity of each measurement model is examined using confirmatory factor analysis and the hypothesized structural model is tested by structural equation modeling.Findings: The authors found that perceived authentic leadership, core self-evaluation, and employees’ psychological empowerment had significant impact on employees’ OCB, accounting for 58 percent of the variance in OCB. In addition, 54 percent of the variance in psychological empowerment was explained by authentic leadership and core self-evaluations, partially mediating the relationship between authentic leadership and OCB and the relationship between core self-evaluations and OCB.Originality/value: Positivity is instrumental in driving intrinsic motivation for work and voluntary devotion to colleagues and organizations. This study contributed to the emerging research branch of management and organizational psychology such as positive organization scholarship and positive organizational behavior by exploring the relationship among the relevant constructs. More specifically, the authors found that positive contextual factor (i.e. authentic leadership), positive personality factor (i.e. core self-evaluations), and positive work experience (i.e. psychological empowerment) do have positive influence on employees’ extra-role performance (i.e. OCB).

A large number of articles have documented that as population density of cities increases, car use declines and public transit use rises. These articles had a significant impact of promoting high-density compact urban development to mitigate traffic congestion. Another approach followed by other researchers used the urban scaling model to indicate that traffic congestion increases as population size of cities increases, thus generating a possible contradictory result. Therefore, this study examines the role of both density and population size on traffic congestion in 164 global cities by the use of Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology model. We divide 164 cities into the two subgroups of 66 low density cities and 98 high density cities for analysis. The findings from the subgroups analysis indicated a clear-cut difference on the critical role of density in low-density cities and the exclusive role of population size in high-density cities. Furthermore, using threshold regression model, 164 cities are divided into the two regions of large and small population cities to determine population scale advantage of traffic congestion. Our findings highlight the importance of including analysis of subgroups based on density and/or population size in future studies of traffic congestion.

Job insecurity can trigger cynical attitudes and ultimately lead to harmful behaviors in organizations under the current fast-changing business environment. Drawing on psychological contract theory, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between job insecurity and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) by focusing on the mediating role of organizational cynicism and moderating roles of perceived organizational support (POS) and leader-member exchange (LMX). The data used for the analysis came from a survey that targeted tourism-related industries in South Korea, and 296 responses were finally analyzed. We analyzed reliability, correlation, and mediation, and conducted confirmatory factor analysis, regression analysis, and moderation analysis using SPSS PROCESS macro v. 3.5, with AMOS v. 25.0. The key findings of this study are as follows. First, we found that job insecurity was positively related to CWB. Second, organizational cynicism mediated the relationship between job insecurity and CWB. Third, POS and LMX intensified the negative effects of job insecurity and organizational cynicism, affecting CWB. These results imply that employees with a high level of POS and LMX are likely to have opportunistic behaviors (e.g., abuse, absences, sabotage) by abusing the support and trust from their organizations. The implications for research and practice, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

Although previous studies on human resource management (HRM) research trends in the global context provided very useful information about the structures of HRM research trends, they have critical limitations. Despite the growing contribution and significance of HRM practices in Korea, a dominant group of scholars has rarely focused on what is going on in the research community in the country. To overcome the limitations and fill the gaps found in studies on the global HRM trends, the purpose of this study is to conduct the keyword network analysis investigating the semantic network structure composed of Korean HRM studies. A total of 1158 research papers published by three top peer-reviewed HRM journals in Korea that were published from 2007 to 2018 were analyzed. The result shows that the whole network structure of Korean HRM has a complex semantic structure that is socially constructed. Additionally, this study identified the top 10 prominent keywords and its ego-centric networks, and nine thematic clusters. By adopting keywords network analysis in bibliometric methods, this study provides an accurate structural interpretation of Korean HRM research practice to facilitate the sustainable development of the studies on the global HRM trends.