Empowering Responsible Consumers to be Sustainable Intrapreneurs

Abstract

Responsible consumers are often employees, spending more time in their professional life than in their private life. Many of them are willing to live up to private values, attitudes and experiences during working hours as well. Some even would like to act as sustainable intrapreneurs and pull and push colleagues and management towards increased sustainability of their organisation. Empowering responsible consumers to act as sustainable intrapreneurs has the potential to support job satisfaction and retention, i.e. typical goals of human resource management (HRM). It can in addition prevent that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is considered to be greenwashing only. In this chapter we will show—after a short introduction—how private life and working life generally interact with each other. Then, we will concentrate on the outside-in spill over effects, i.e. on how private responsible behaviour might be utilized by HRM and CSR management. For that purpose, we will first present the concept of sustainable intrapreneurship and then the determinants of psychological empowerment. We combine these two by showing how relevant HRM measures might create and increase empowerment for sustainable intrapreneurship. After that, we will discuss chances and risks of this approach before we finally give some conclusions for managers and researchers.