Effects of institutional environmental forces on participation in environmental initiatives

Abstract

This paper extends the environmental management literature by theorizing on and empirically validating the impacts of three different institutional environmental forces (IEFs): coercive, normative, and mimetic institutional environmental forces. We use a multi-method research design with two studies to examine the impacts of these forces by first investigating the environmental behaviors of individuals when they encounter these forces in their daily life, then examining their response towards environmental messages that reflect these three different forces. Specifically, we examine in Study 1 how these forces affect the environmental behaviors of individuals in terms of their participation in sorting and reducing waste, and other environmental activities through a mass survey. In Study 2, we investigate how the environmental messages of firms based on their environmental initiatives are emotionally received by individuals through electroencephalography (EEG). The findings suggest the importance of using normative and mimetic IEFs in addition to coercive IEFs to motivate participation in environmental initiatives.