Coaching for Climate Action: How Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility Foster Pro‐Environmental Behavior

ABSTRACT Despite the strategic urgency of corporate sustainability, fostering employees' voluntary pro‐environmental behavior at work (PEBW) remains a critical organizational challenge. Drawing on Social Information Processing (SIP) theory, this research explicates the psychological mechanisms linking coaching leadership to PEBW, positioning leadership as a proximal informational cue that shapes employees' role perceptions and self‐definitions. We propose a comprehensive model wherein coaching leadership promotes PEBW through the sequential mediating roles of meaningfulness of work and organizational identification, while investigating corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a critical boundary condition. Employing a four‐wave time‐lagged research design with data collected from 415 South Korean employees, the findings reveal that coaching leadership exerts both a direct positive influence on PEBW and an indirect influence via the proposed attitudinal pathway. Specifically, the developmental signals provided by coaching leaders enhance employees' sense of meaningfulness, which is subsequently attributed to the organization, fostering a deep sense of organizational identification that drives discretionary environmental actions. Furthermore, the results confirm that CSR functions as a pivotal contextual filter. By bridging the micro‐dynamics of developmental leadership with the macro‐context of organizational ethics, this study establishes a high level of originality within the sustainability literature. The findings explicitly reveal that employees do not process leadership behaviors in a vacuum. Instead, macro‐level moral frameworks, such as CSR, are absolute prerequisites to validate the authenticity of micro‐level leadership interventions. Consequently, this research provides a groundbreaking perspective by proving that developmental leadership effectively cultivates identity‐based ecological stewardship exclusively when anchored in a genuinely responsible corporate environment.