Beyond Profit: The Effect of ESG on Employee Discretionary Behavior and Organizational Pride

This study examines how employees’ perceptions of their organization’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities promote discretionary behaviors through organizational pride, and how proactive personality moderates these relationships. Drawing on social identity and proactive motivation theories, the study hypothesizes that employees who perceive their organization’s ESG initiatives as authentic experience organizational pride derived from value congruence, which in turn, motivates helping and voice behaviors. Proactive personality is further proposed to moderate the strength of this affective–behavioral linkage. Data were collected from 309 full-time employees in Korean financial institutions through an online survey. Results from structural equation modeling indicated that organizational pride acts as a key affective mechanism linking perceived ESG activities to employee helping and voice behaviors. Moderated mediation analyses using the PROCESS Macro revealed that the indirect effect of ESG perceptions on discretionary behavior via organizational pride was stronger among employees with lower levels of proactive personality, suggesting that highly proactive employees rely less on affective cues such as pride to engage in discretionary behaviors, whereas those with lower proactivity are more influenced by such emotional motivations. By integrating moral, affective, and motivational perspectives, this study highlights that employees’ perceptions of organizational ESG practices can generate emotional resources that encourage prosocial and change-oriented behavior.