University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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solutions might even exaggerate the power of managerial solutions: if the employees’
own values and attitudes towards environment differ from the managers’ ones or the
company’s explicit “values” or policy, they might, unconsciously or deliberately, not
act in accordance with those values or policies.
The move of the focus from the organizational to individual level in the
environmental management discourse does not mean ignoring the organizational
outcomes. Values of individuals can be aggregated into organizational level to allow
for example comparisons between organizations. Different multilevel methods (see
for example Klein & Kozlowski 2000) can also be useful in order to establish
relationship between individual level variables and organizational level outcomes.
The proposed approach suggests that instead for looking at the managerial solutions
to environmental issues, the values of employees and values of society members at
large need also to be taken seriously into account when discussing the business
organizations’ strategies and policies towards more environmental practices.
To conclude, a proper measure of employees’ environmental values should contain a
scale that measures the environmental orientation, for example the revised NEP scale
(Dunlap et al. 2000) or Thompson and Barton (1994) scale. At the same time, for
increased face and construct validity, and for increased usability of the results, the
scale should be adapted to organizational and business reality. Experiences from
environmental psychology studies (e.g. Bjerke & Kaltenborn 1999) show that NEP
scale can be combined with other scales and applied to different samples. Thus, for
organizational and business purposes, items capturing the essence of environmental
issues faced by business organizations, such as conflicts with win-win-situations and
growth orientation, should be added.
Conclusions
Research on environmental values and attitudes both at individual, organizational
and societal level is by its nature cross-disciplinary. One might argue that the
academic boundaries between different disciplines have been an obstacle in
generating a more comprehensive understanding of the origins and impacts of
environmental values. These boundaries seem to have been highest in the field of
management, where very little ideas from other disciplines have been extensively
used and empirically tested. For example, Kallio and Nordberg (2006) mention that
ideas borrowed from environmental sociology and philosophy have not been well
incorporated in mainstream organization and environment research. Therefore, it
might be appropriate to suggest a new stream of research, managerial environmental
value studies, which would draw from management and organization theory,
environmental psychology, sociology and philosophy, economics, and other
disciplines relevant to the topic studied, in order to find linkages between individual
values, organizational values and organizational outcomes with regard to
environmental performance of organizations.
Much of the management and organization research is about the organizational
outcomes. Practical application of scientific models in business requires that the
model can be used to predict the behavior of the members of organizations. In this