| Summary: | <p> The importance of effective leadership practices as related to environmental issues and climate change is well established by climate change policy negotiators and there has been an increasing trend in leadership roles being created in organizations to address environmental issues. Organizational change efforts focused on social responsibility initiatives, such as changing environmentally relevant behaviors, often generate significant costs for organizations without contributing to desired results and messages from leaders to stakeholders in organizations do not frequently align with performance related to those messages. The science of behavior analysis focuses on the prediction and influence of socially significant behavior and provides principles to address performance in organizational settings. In the current study, principles of behavior analysis were applied to examine the relationship between a leader’s verbal behavior with an employee and that employee’s performance. Antecedent rule statements about climate change and human behavior were emailed by a leader to employees to examine the effect of those communications on employee energy consumption as related to each individual employee’s values about anthropogenic climate change. In an analysis of employee reported values as related to human-caused climate change and the effects of leader communication on energy consumption behavior based on those individual values, results provided additional information about the potential utility of tailoring leader communication to employee values and also provided findings that informed future research directions in the area of the effect of a leader’s verbal behavior on employee performance in context of values.</p>
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