What is it about?
This study looks at how employees decide to act in socially responsible ways at work. Using surveys in Germany and the UK, we test whether attitudes, social norms and perceived control explain everyday behaviours such as speaking up, sharing problems, suggesting improvements and actively helping colleagues.
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Why is it important?
The “S” in ESG is often the least defined and hardest to measure. Our findings show that employees’ attitudes, perceived social pressure and sense of control meaningfully predict key socially sustainable behaviours like participation and cooperation. This provides a theory-based toolkit for companies that must now report on social sustainability: instead of relying only on structural KPIs, they can target beliefs, leadership behaviour and communication culture to foster fairer, more participative and cooperative workplaces.
Perspectives
In this project, I found it striking that relatively small, concrete actions (e.g., sharing problems with a manager, suggesting improvements, helping colleague) capture much of what social sustainability means on the ground. At the same time, our results show that classic rational models like the Theory of Planned Behaviour do not explain everything; leadership style, trust and culture seem to matter just as much as individual beliefs. For me, the key message to organisations is that social sustainability is not only a reporting requirement but a lived practice: it depends on how leaders invite participation, respond to suggestions and create conditions in which cooperation becomes the norm rather than the exception
Prof. Dr. Thomas Rigotti
Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR) and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The S in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG): Utility of the Theory of Planned Behaviour for explaining social sustainable behaviour, German Journal of Human Resource Management Zeitschrift für Personalforschung, June 2025, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/23970022251337860.
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