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1. Introduction
While recent environmental sustainability research works in the operations management (OM) field have focused on product acquisition management and sustainability performance from a supply point of view (Walker et al., 2014), little attention has been paid to the examination of factors influencing the demand for environmentally friendly products, including environmentally friendly cars, from a consumer’s perspective (Wang and Hazen, 2016). Although researchers have investigated the effects of environmental awareness in the environmentally friendly product purchasing decision-making process (Wang and Hazen, 2016), prior studies are limited to how environmental awareness relevant to the specific product relates to purchasing intention. This is an important research gap in the OM literature that decisions about environmentally sustainable products drive production and the associated operations.
To that end, this is the first study to examine the impacts of an individual’s general environmental awareness on intention to purchase an environmentally friendly automobile (i.e. car). The objectives of this research are to posit, develop and test an Environmental Awareness Purchasing Intention Model (EAPIM) and to evaluate the relative contribution of the environmental awareness factors to the model. Quality and self-image factors in the context of automobile purchasing serve as the study setting. This study attempts to answer the following key research questions:
How does general environmental awareness – including factors of environmental attitude, environmental subjective norms and perceived control toward environmentally responsible behavior – influence consumers intentions to purchase environmentally friendly cars?
How strong is the effect of general environmental awareness compared to vehicle relevant factors in the model contribute to consumers purchasing intentions?
This research integrates and contextualizes several different theories to develop the framework in the context of environmental awareness of consumers’ purchasing decision-making process. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991) serves as the foundation for this research. Even though Ajzen emphasized TPB’s nature as “a theory designed to predict and explain human behavior in specific contexts,” we expand TPB to the context of general environmental awareness factors based on our desire to show how nonspecific environmental awareness factors are inculcated into a decision-making process and subsequently influence specific outcomes, such as automobile purchasing intention. In addition, Bagozzi’s (1992) self-image/product-image congruity theory (Sirgy, 1982) is relevant in supporting the structural relationships in the...