Green IT beliefs and pro-environmental IT practices among IT professionals

Abstract

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyze the beliefs and attitudinal factors that affect the private sphere pro-environmental behavior of information technology (IT) professionals in using personal computers.Design/methodology/approach– A research framework that draws from the belief-action-outcome (BAO) framework and that consisted of 11 hypotheses was developed. Data were collected from a sample of 322 IT professionals and analyzed using structural equation modeling.Findings– The results identify the pro-environmental personal computing actions that IT professionals are taking and how their Green IT beliefs, attitudes, information acquisition capability, and organizational fields influence their behavior.Research limitations/implications– The sample was limited to Australian respondents. The measurement of IT-specific environmental practices was not exhaustive nor were the measures of macro- and micro-antecedents of Green IT belief and attitude.Practical implications– National, regional, and international professional associations such as the Association of Information Systems can influence pro-environmental behavior among IT professionals through the creation and dissemination of information that shape both general and IT-specific environmental beliefs.Originality/value– The novelty of this work lies in: first, proposing and testing a research framework that can be leveraged in future studies; second, establishing how organizational fields and availability of information contribute to the formation of IT professionals’ environmental beliefs and attitudes; third, applying and suggesting potential extension to the BAO framework to evaluate the association between IT practices and environmental sustainability among IT professionals.