INVESTIGATING OWNER-MANAGER’S INTENTION TO ADOPT ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AMONG FOOD PROCESSING SMEs IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

The environmental degradation is a global issue and at the current rate of economic and industrial development, the world might not be able to sustain the biodiversity and ecosystem in the future. From the business setting, interest on the environmental subjects started to grow when pressure from the public and environmental awareness groups elevated the specific requirements for companies. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) regards that individual’s behavior is determined by the intention of performing a certain behavior. Accordingly, the individual intention is determined by three factors associated to anticipated outcome of the behavior, namely; (i) the attitude toward the behavior (ii) the perceived subjective norms and (iii) the perceived behavioral control over the action. Thus, the aim of this article is to establish the impact of these three factors towards the intention to adopt environmental management practices (EMPs). The data were collected via email-based survey, which was sent to 1473 owners-manager of food SMEs in Malaysia, and 367 usable samples were analyzed. Structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis was performed to analyze the causal effects of attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control on the intention to adopt EMPs. The results of SEM revealed that two variables were found to be statistically significant, namely, perceived behavioral control (β = 0.597, p < 0.001) and attitude (β = 0.255, p < 0.001), whereas, subjective norm (β = 0.006, p = 0.888) appeared to be insignificant. As can be seen from the findings, perceived behavioral control become the strongest predictor on intention to adopt EMPs, which reflected that entrepreneurs that have strong behavioral control will have more intention to adopt EMPs. On the other note, subjective norm was perceived as unimportant factor in determining the EMPs intention among the food manufacturing entrepreneurs in Malaysia