Voluntary Leadership And Risk Perception In Environemental Collective Actions

Environmental collective action is one of the key forms for public participationin environmental issues. Little research work has been done to explore howindividuals confront the conflict between personal and collective interest, how theydecide their commitment, and the voluntary leadership mechanism in environmentalcollective action. At the same time, public perception of environmental risks hasgreatly intensified. It is unclear how such a perception affects environmentalcollective action.The current research constructs a virtual context for environmental collectiveaction, measuring participants' commitment with their donation amount. Fourspecific behavioral games are designed to examine feedback effect and voluntaryleadership. The introduction of elimination process and changeable commitment involuntary leadership game makes it possible to study the motivations of voluntaryleaders. In addition, this research designs a series of surveys to investigateenvironmental risk perception, its underlying factors, and their influence onenvironmental collective action.Analyses show that participants are highly worried about environmental risk,especially its social threat. Environmental risk perception is affected by hazardexperience, scientific knowledge and numeracy. Meanwhile, environmental valueonly influences the perception social threat, due to its social orientation.Participants' commitment in environmental collective action is found rather high,and not subject to the feedback effect. The commitment is mainly determined byenvironmental risk perception, and not affected by experience, scientific knowledgeand numeracy. Despite the personal cost of voluntary leadership, it is found acommon phenomenon. An inquiry into the motivation of voluntary leadershipsuggests that most voluntary leaders have an impure motivation, and the decision asvoluntary leader is affected by commitment, gender, and scientific knowledge, butnot risk perception. When willingness to act as voluntary leader is eliminated, mostparticipants lower their commitment, which is mainly influenced by thecommitment of the randomly chosen leader. Finally, voluntary leadership is not asuperior leadership mechanism, as it is no different from imposed leadership innudging the commitment of followers.This study explores many phenomena and problems in environmentalcollective action, and examines factors underlying them with environmental riskperception being the mediator. It holds value in explaining collective action withindividual level factors, and showing the conflict of interest and complexity of voluntary leadership in environmental collective action. The current researchfurthers our understanding of environmental collective action, and marks a trial inthe integration of social science. Findings in this research provide many valuablesuggestions and new directions for improvement in the performance ofenvironmental collective action for related stakeholders, civil organizations andgovernment agencies in particular.