What Explains Change-Supporting Behavior within Local Agenda 21 Civil Society Groups to Promote Sustainable Development?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I really appreciated your work, I believe the topic is of high interest and the results are significant for enhancing the literature, but also practice.

Just a few suggestions regarding the text:

• in lines 484 and 501, you wrote "I found it", given that there are more authors, maybe it would sound better with "we found"
• in line 604 add a "the" before aim, it feels like it's missing.
• in line 652, maybe you should tonne down your claims on being the first study that..., you never know who performs the same work that you do in the same time.

Congratulations on your work!

Author Response

Thank you very much for your encouraging words about our manuscript, and the helpful review reports.

Thank you for your remarks, which we have all addressed in our revised manuscript. 

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript addresses the social exchange in a national scale of civil society group members, to simulate with their supporting behavior, which is still relatively interesting and is of great current concern to those dealing with real-world data associated with their symbols as well as the theory in Germany. I found the manuscript sufficiently original and interesting to warrant future publication after it is revised. In general, the manuscript is  well written. 

Introduction

Please add your hypothesis through your objective of this study in this project. It needs to be more clearly defined and how the results may aid research in a wider context in your model. Please be specific to detect social change related to your topic of supporting behaviors.

Materials and Methods

Your modelling in your detecting regarding to trace many signals in-situ behavior change, and please announce the variation of thresholds as well for some causality between reasons, such as their change-supporting behaviors, should be considered to measure the relations of each causes and effects (may be do not have their correlations) from the perspective for each connected behaviors in a substantive dynamic model. Any model could be involved in these aforementioned data? Any anthropogenic data and/or social dimension data could be used? How to measure change in your individuals is crucial to calculate in your metric analyses. If you consider class-level metrics (i.e., non-supporting groups in social class), then, as I said I am interested on your process simulation: “that participation and leader-member-exchange (LMX) positively affected group members’ procedural justice perceptions and that procedural justice positively affected group members’ change-supporting behavior. Procedural justice further mediated the relationship between participation, LMX and change-supporting behavior.….” How to measure the relations between change-supporting behaviors and your tracing in their behavioral change? Do you have other explanations regarding to your findings? How about other natural process? And why? Any conflicts with your arguments? Any limitation in your model? Please be specific.

Case Study

1.Please provide your questionnaire to support while other studies conducted in other culture, region, social context could be learned your experiences in full items to be gathered as a full dimension.

2. Please add more argument in your result. Please visualize your result by some figures and tables. I strongly recommended that you may use regression models to illustrate your figures to please our readers.

3.Please specific in your discussion part as a comparative study to further support your arguments. Please be specific about your practical implications from justification in your arguments.

4. In your Table 1, please explain your means and standard deviations. Please check your format in Table 1.

5. Please try to reschedule your Table 1 with more explanations utilized T-test, ANOVA to examine your final results.

6. In line 506, your note should be noticed about your words in capital  regarded as a typo.

Author Response

Introductory Comment

This manuscript addresses the social exchange in a national scale of civil society group members, to simulate with their supporting behavior, which is still relatively interesting and is of great current concern to those dealing with real-world data associated with their symbols as well as the theory in Germany. I found the manuscript sufficiently original and interesting to warrant future publication after it is revised. In general, the manuscript is well written.

Authors’ response

First, we would like to thank the very helpful comments. We have attempted to address all of the concerns and suggestions, and believe the revised manuscript has benefitted much from the comments we received.

Comment 1: Introduction

Please add your hypothesis through your objective of this study in this project. It needs to be more clearly defined and how the results may aid research in a wider context in your model. Please be specific to detect social change related to your topic of supporting behaviors.

Authors’ response

Thank you for your advice to address our research questions in the first section of our introduction. To be more specific, we have added the following sentence to this section:

“To answer these questions and better understand civil society group members’ drivers within this societal change process towards more sustainability, in our study we examine the impact of perceived participation, leader-member-exchange (LMX), procedural justice, and procedural justice climate on civil society group members’ change-supporting behavior. Thereby, we draw on the theoretical assumptions of social exchange theory [7,8].“

Comment 2: Materials and Methods

Your modelling in your detecting regarding to trace many signals in-situ behavior change, and please announce the variation of thresholds as well for some causality between reasons, such as their change-supporting behaviors, should be considered to measure the relations of each causes and effects (may be do not have their correlations) from the perspective for each connected behaviors in a substantive dynamic model. Any model could be involved in these aforementioned data? Any anthropogenic data and/or social dimension data could be used? How to measure change in your individuals is crucial to calculate in your metric analyses. If you consider class-level metrics (i.e., non-supporting groups in social class), then, as I said I am interested on your process simulation: “that participation and leader-member-exchange (LMX) positively affected group members’ procedural justice perceptions and that procedural justice positively affected group members’ change-supporting behavior. Procedural justice further mediated the relationship between participation, LMX and change-supporting behavior.….” How to measure the relations between change-supporting behaviors and your tracing in their behavioral change? Do you have other explanations regarding to your findings? How about other natural process? And why? Any conflicts with your arguments? Any limitation in your model? Please be specific.

Authors’ response

Thank you for your advice regarding our statistical model, our implemented measures and possible alternative explanations that could possibly account for our observations. In our statistical analysis, we accounted for individual as well as group level influences by using hierarchical linear modelling (HLM). Concerning our findings, we can therefore say that we corrected for group level influences from individual group memberships. The study sample did not include non-supporting groups, which we will gladly take into account for future research.

As far as the measurement of change-supporting behavior, we focused on subjective individual assessment and did not include further objective measures such as means to objectively measure the achievement of sustainability goals, Thus, we recommend in our discussion that future research should additionally collect objective data to undermine our findings. However, building on the approved Social Exchange Theory our aim was to examine the psychological and interpersonal relationships in the context of sustainability and change-supporting behavior, which can best be assessed by self-ratings. Nevertheless, we are inviting future studies to follow-up and build on our findings by further examining objective data in that realm in our discussion.

 

Comment 3: Case Study

1. Please provide your questionnaire to support while other studies conducted in other culture, region, social context could be learned your experiences in full items to be gathered as a full dimension.

Authors’ response

We have inserted all Items into our manuscript to enable others researchers the item use.

 

2. Please add more argument in your result. Please visualize your result by some figures and tables. I strongly recommended that you may use regression models to illustrate your figures to please our readers.

Authors’ response

Thank you for your advice. To account for group level influences, we used hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) instead of linear regression modelling. The comparative analysis of the multiple models that have been taken into account via HLM are depicted in Tables 1-4. To further illustrate our findings, we followed up on your suggestion and added Figure 3 (line 648 to 656). Figure 3 depicts our resulting scheme along with the significant relationships between our study variables.

 

3.Please specific in your discussion part as a comparative study to further support your arguments. Please be specific about your practical implications from justification in your arguments.

Authors’ response

Thank you for the advice. We specified now in the discussion part (line 713 to 716) how important the design of comparison is for the generalizability of our results, however also stressing the need for expansion of the basis of comparison in further studies. In addition, we added further practical implications of our study for the meaningful inclusion of Agenda 21 groups into the decision-making processes on the local level (line 812 to 816).

 

4. In your Table 1, please explain your means and standard deviations. Please check your format in Table 1.

Authors’ response

In addition to the information’s provided in the table, we report means and standard deviations of our study variables in the results section as well as in the participants and procedure section in terms of demographic variables. We fixed the format of Table 1 to further avoid any misinterpretation of the depicted data.

 

5. Please try to reschedule your Table 1 with more explanations utilized T-test, ANOVA to examine your final results.

Authors’ response

To account for group level influences, we used hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) (as previously stated in Comments 2: Materials and Methods). Doing so, we did not calculate separate T-tests or ANOVAs, as we did not expect to gain additional information for the multi-level structure of our data. However, we fixed the formatting of Table 1 to avoid possible misinterpretation of the data.

 

6. In line 506, your note should be noticed about your words in capital regarded as a typo.

Authors’ response

We have now corrected the notes to Table 1 accordingly.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is interesting for readers. The paper is overall acceptable. Some minor changes should be made.

At the end of the introduction, add two paragraphs. In the first paragraph, explain what is the contribution of the paper, in relation to several previous papers - at least 1-2 references from scholarly journals, not later than 2010
In the second paragraph, describe other sections of the paper.

At the end of the paper, please, add Future Studies and Recommendations.

Author Response

We are grateful for your positive and encouraging words about the revision of our manuscript! We are convinced that your suggestions enabled us to further improve the manuscript and make our argumentation and conclusions more convincing and comprehensive. We believe that these changes further strengthened the paper and hope that you agree.

After the research questions, we now describe the structure and other sections of the article in more detail (line 79 to 84).

In the introduction, we have added a paragraph on the paper’s contribution, which reads as follows:

“This study contributes to the literature in the following way. First, although social exchange theory has been used to explain employees’ change supporting behavior during organizational change [9,10], based on this theory the impact of perceived participation, LMX and procedural justice has less frequently be examined in the context of societal change towards more sustainability [11]. By applying social exchange theory [7,8] within a societal change context, we transfer this theory to this area of research. Thus, we offer practical implications for members of grass root initiatives or NGOs and other stakeholders within municipalities aiming for a more sustainable society.”

As requested, we added at the end of the article Future Studies and Recommendations (line 839 to 847).

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The revised version of the manuscript appears to be good for me. When reviewing a revised manuscript, I 'm checking that the revisions are satisfactory.