Green management adoption for sustainable business performance of small and medium-sized companies

Abstract

The emergence of green management has become a big challenge for the survival of small and medium-sized companies in Malaysia to safeguard the environment, economic and social impacts. The small and medium-sized companies found difficulties to comply with green implementation due to lack of understanding, unavailable of specific guidelines, and financial limitation. Utilisation of internal resources and capabilities (other than financial source) are essential in order to adopt the green practices for small and medium-sized companies’ transformation into green business. Thus, the study investigated the relationships of management strategy, product development, process technology, workplace resources, community obligation, and knowledge management on the sustainable business performance. As a quantitative research design, the 5-points Likert Scale survey questionnaires were distributed to middle management of the small and medium-sized companies who attended various trainings, seminars, workshops and expositions held in Melaka, Johor, Kuala Lumpur, and Selangor. The use of multistage sampling strategy was managed to collect 324 data, where only 281 responses were considered after screening for analysis using SPSS (version 23) and PLS-SEM (version 3.0). Results shown that management strategy, process technology, workplace resources, community obligation, and knowledge management were significantly related with sustainable business performance or the triple-bottom-line goals. However, the outcome also indicated that product development factor did not influence the sustainable business performance of the small and medium-sized companies. The study confirmed that internal resources of companies played an important role between the relationship of green management and sustainable business performance; and the result is achievable. Findings implied that the government through its relevant agencies should encourage small and medium-sized companies to explore and identify their internal resources and capabilities in order to enhance their sustainable performance. Besides, the ministries and agencies concerned could design suitable modules and train the small and medium-sized companies’ management on relevant manufacturing tools to use for their problem-solving and decision-making purpose.