Environmental Knowledge Sharing: Scale Development and Validation in the Context of Organizational Green Transformation

Abstract

Organizations need employees to exchange and transform environmental knowledge if green policies are to become routine practices, yet existing knowledge-sharing measures do not fully capture the environmental, institutional, and practice-oriented attributes of this process. This study develops and initially validates an environmental knowledge-sharing scale for organizational green transformation. Conceptually, the scale distinguishes environmental knowledge contribution, environmental knowledge acquisition, and environmental knowledge integration, with integration defined as the combination and internalization of exchanged environmental knowledge rather than downstream organizational performance. Following a multistage scale-development procedure, twelve candidate items were generated from prior research and green-management practice, assessed by five experts, and pretested with eighty employees. An online formal survey yielded 618 valid employee responses from registered construction enterprises in Hainan Province, China. The cleaned data were divided into two non-overlapping subsamples: 302 respondents for exploratory factor analysis and 316 different respondents for confirmatory factor analysis. Principal-axis factoring with Promax rotation and parallel analysis supported three factors and identified two psychometrically ambiguous items for sequential removal, resulting in a ten-item scale. Confirmatory factor analysis in the non-overlapping validation subsample indicated satisfactory fit: chi-square with 32 degrees of freedom was 36.672, the probability value was 0.261, the comparative fit index was 0.999, the Tucker–Lewis index was 0.998, the root mean square error of approximation was 0.015, and the standardized root mean square residual was 0.019. Standardized loadings ranged from 0.765 to 0.885, reliability coefficients ranged from 0.854 to 0.893, average variance extracted ranged from 0.650 to 0.735, and all heterotrait–monotrait ratios were below 0.423. Alternative measurement models fitted substantially worse. The scale provides a concise instrument for studying employee-level environmental knowledge processes, while cross-context, multi-source, predictive, and measurement-invariance validation remain necessary.