Green decisions: The role of environmental strategies and proactivity in India’s manufacturing micro enterprises

By focusing on environmental management accounting in SMEs, the study helps SME managers to effectively understand and find better ways of improving environmental management. The paper investigates environmental management accounting applications in manufacturing small and medium enterprises in Gauteng province. Small and medium enterprises were chosen based on their exclusion from the mainstream research on environmental management accounting (EMA). To achieve the main aim of the study, 24 in-depth interviews were undertaken among SMEs’ managers, accountants, chief executive officers, and owners. The study found that physical EMA is more common in SMEs than monetary EMA. 77% of SMEs’ respondents confirm using physical environmental information in their operations. Therefore, SMEs prefer EMA practices with little cost or no cost attached and practices that can effectively generate returns in the short term. In addition, the avoidance of monetary EMA is anchored on the premise of avoiding costly projects with no immediate material financial returns. Therefore, EMA is critical for SMEs to achieve sustainability.

Green human resource management (GHRM) is bringing positive transformations in business and society, as well as challenges for hotels. Drawing from social cognitive theory (SCT), this study examined green HRM with environmental and social performance. Significantly, this paper also used organizational green culture as a mediation variable. This empirical study employed a quantitative research method. Data were collected from 155 employees working in Pakistan’s hotels. The results demonstrate that green HRM (t-statistic value = 9.676, p-value = 0.000) is positively related to organizational green culture. In addition, organizational green culture (t-statistic value = 11.254, p-value = 0.000, t-statistic value = 16.882, p-value = 0.000) has a significant effect on environmental and social performance. Moreover, organizational green culture fully mediated the relationship between green HRM and environmental performance (t-statistic value = 5.444, p-value = 0.000). Finally, organizational green culture fully mediated the relationship between green HRM and social performance (t-statistic value = 7.218, p-value = 0.000).

Acknowledgment
This work is partially funded under FaME TBU No. IGA/FaME/2023/012 “Closed and open innovations: role of human resource, servant leadership, digitalisation, and uncertainty.” Authors would like to thank Prof. Rasa Smaliukienė for partially funding this research. This work also acknowledged Grant No.FSR-FORD 5-6/2022-23/FaME/006 “Linking stakeholder pressure, green HRM application and competitive advantage in the hotel industry.”

The ambitious goals of environmental sustainability stated in international agreements and national programs require developing strategies to achieve them. At the same time, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the environmental performance factors, which can be purposefully changed to achieve an effective result in the short and medium-term. The paper aims to find the institutional factors of national environmental performance, including financial ones, which might be effectively used as environmental sustainability management tools. For this, the relationships between the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), as the dependent variable, and the indicators of control of corruption, the effectiveness of an anti-monopoly policy, financial opportunities, undue influence, corporate culture, innovation output, GDP, and income growth among the poorest population, using a sample of 81 countries, and the technique for constructing nonlinear regression models based on the normalizing transformations for non-Gaussian data were studied.
The study findings show that environmental performance can be predicted with sufficient accuracy by a linear model of its dependence on corruption control, minority shareholders protection, judicial independence, favoritism in decisions of government officials, tax incentives, ease of access to loans, and innovation output. Adding GDP per capita to the explanatory variables of the EPI model does not significantly affect the result accuracy but changes the model shape from linear to nonlinear. The paper substantiates ways to apply results for institutional reforms and sustainability management, such as inflation targeting, public credit guarantee schemes, performance-based loans, etc.