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

Purpose - 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 eleven hypotheses was developed. Data were collected from a sample of 322 IT professionals and analyzed using structural equation modelling. 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 (a) proposing and testing a research framework that can be leveraged in future studies (b) establishing how organizational fields and availability of information contribute to the formation of IT professionals' environmental beliefs and attitudes (c) applying and suggesting potential extension to the BAO framework to evaluate the association between IT practices and environmental sustainability amongst IT professionals.