A mediation model of green supply chain management adoption: The role of internal impetus

Abstract

Previous research provides evidence that the adoption of Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) is associated with improved organizational performance, suggesting that GSCM may help companies align environmental and economic goals. Therefore, it becomes important to understand the factors that encourage GSCM adoption. In addition to institutional drivers such as regulations, markets, and suppliers, we suggest that internal impetus, denoting an organization's inner motivation and managerial commitment toward environmental sustainability, is a key driver of GSCM adoption. Combining institutional and self-determination theories, we argue that markets and suppliers as non-coercive institutional drivers stimulate internal impetus while regulations, representing a coercive pressure, do not play this role. This leads us to propose a model of GSCM adoption in which pressures from markets and suppliers are mediated by internal impetus, while regulatory pressures impact adoption directly. We test this model with a sample of 60 manufacturing companies in the U.S. Midwest region using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique. Our findings suggest that: (1) suppliers impact GSCM adoption both directly and through the mediating effect of internal impetus; (2) customers and other market pressures on GSCM adoption are fully mediated by internal impetus; (3) regulatory pressures have no impact on GSCM adoption for the companies in our sample. Our results highlight the importance of managerial commitment and the key role of suppliers in successful GSCM adoption. We discuss the implications of these findings and provide recommendations for managers.