Cultivating a responsible dining mindset: Pro-environmental voice behavior by frontline service employees in restaurants

Restaurants play a crucial role in reducing food waste, with frontline employees influencing customers’ consumption behaviour. This study introduces and validates a novel construct, i.e., pro-environmental voice behaviour (PEVB), defined as frontline employees’ provision of environmentally conscious suggestions to customers that balance service quality with food waste reduction. Across four studies, we develop and validate the PEVB scale. Study 1 used 21 semi-structured interviews to generate initial items. Study 2, with 194 respondents, identified 12 items across three dimensions: routine voice, informative voice, and remedial voice. Study 3 employed a time-lagged design to examine antecedents of PEVB, showing that face value reduces PEVB through moral disengagement, while pro-environmental value was unrelated to PEVB via moral obligation. Study 4, using two independent samples, confirmed the factorial, convergent, and discriminant validity of the scale. Together, the findings provide a robust foundation for understanding and measuring employees’ pro-environmental voice in service contexts.