Investigating employee attitudes towards adopting green supply chain practices in Indian SMEs

Abstract

Green supply chain management (GSCM) is an increasingly important aspect in today’s supply chain practice. Meeting environmental concerns in industrial operations has evoked interest among environmentalists, government bodies, academics and business organisations in recent years. However, current research indicates that industries are sometimes focusing more on making profits using green supply chain (GSC) practices rather than on saving the environment. To understand this aspect more clearly, this research aims to investigate the current drivers for Indian SMEs to adopt GSC practices in their businesses, the barriers they are facing in implementing these practices, and the attitudes of the SME employees’ towards adopting such practices. This is an on-going PhD research that highlights literature review and methodology that has been carried out so far. The research will be qualitative in nature, combining a multiple case study strategy with face-to-face semi-structured interviews to collect the main data. Data analysis will be conducted using thematic analysis, as this is considered the most appropriate approach to organise and analyse this class of qualitative data. The main contribution of the research will be to develop a conceptual framework of GSCM with a focus on Indian SME employee attitudes towards GSC practices. A future paper will discuss the research findings once the investigative part of this research has been completed. In addition, it is expected that this research will point out other relevant issues that were not considered in this study, but may be worthy of future investigation.