Top-management's role in adopting green purchasing standards in high-tech industrial firms

Abstract

Few prior studies on green purchasing examine the impact of top-management commitment to new regulatory requirements, customer pressure, and suppliers' opportunities to adopt new green purchase requirements. This study attempts to fill this research gap and explores the effects of critical drivers on firms' adoption of green purchasing. This study collected 239 useable questionnaires from 863 electronics firms. The empirical results demonstrate that environmental collaboration with suppliers, top-management commitment, and customer pressure influence firms' green purchasing positively and significantly. Besides directly affecting green purchasing, top-management commitment also indirectly affects green purchasing via environmental collaboration with suppliers. Overall, internal motives of top-management commitment and environmental collaboration with suppliers exceed the external motives of regulatory pressure and customer pressure with regard to green purchasing adoption. Top-management commitment is the primary driver of firms' success in adopting green purchasing standards.