University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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of individual value patterns of employees in shaping the environmental performance
of the organization. Also, the paper discusses how scales on environmental values
used in psychology and sociology can be applied within the field of management.
Scales on Environmental Values in Psychology and
Socialogy
Within environmental psychology and environmental sociology, there is a vast
amount of research addressing the individuals’ and society’s values and attitudes
towards the environment. In some of these studies (Dunlap & McCright 2008,
Dunlap & York 2008, Hansla et al. 2008; Ryan & Spash 2008; Grob 1995) the
studied population has been general public while other studies have sampled more
specific populations, such as farmers, wildlife managers and biologists (Bjerke &
Kaltenborn 1999), car owners (Gärling et al. 2003; Nordlund & Garvill 2003),
members of transportation associations (Kaiser, Wölfing & Fuhrer 1999), and public
and private decision makers (Nilsson, von Borgstede & Biel 2004). It can be also
mentioned that several studies (Karp 1996; Kortenkamp & Moore 2001; Milfont &
Gouveia 2006; Schultz & Zelezny 1999; Snelgar 2006; Stern, Dietz & Kalof 1993)
have used student samples, obviously for convenient and easy access, even if this
procedure is not easy to motivate from an adequate sampling perspective. In the
context of this paper, it is worth noting that none of these studies has been conducted
in a business environment and with participants being representatives or employees
of business organizations. Therefore, some level of carefulness is needed before
findings of and scales from these studies can be applied in a business context. The
possibilities for applying psychological and sociological scales in the management
context will be discussed later in this paper.
Based on a database search in EBSCO, ProQuest and other social science databases,
it seems that the main body of empirical research addressing environmental values of
individuals and societies is conducted either within psychology or within sociology.
There has also been a more or less philosophically oriented but at the same time
cross-disciplinary debate on environmental ethics (for example Gladwin et al. 1995,
Purser et al. 1995, Shrivastava 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1996) even within the context
of management and organization studies, but this discussion, regardless of its
importance, has not led to empirical studies of the concepts presented in those
articles. The outcome of this is a clear lack of empirical research on environmental
values and attitudes in business organizations. However, the methods and scales used
in psychological and sociological studies of environmental values can, with some
modifications, be used as a base for development of environmental value scales for
use in business context as well.
It is not easy to draw strict lines between environmental psychology and
environmental sociology, because psychologists are using also sociological concepts
and vice versa. Scientists from different disciplines also treat the concepts of values
and attitudes in different ways, and the difference between those two is somewhat
unclear and depending on the theoretical framework used.