Green IT: an Empirical Study regarding Organizational Actions and Impacts on Environmental Performance

Environmental sustainability has become increasingly important to business as a response to rapid depletion of natural resources. IT specifically represents a meaningful part of environmental issues which society has faced lately. In this sense, Green IT/S emerges as a way of combining available resources and sustainable and economic policies, thus generating benefits for the environment and for business. So, this research aims at investigating the organizational actions that stimulate the implementation of Green IT and its subsequent impacts on environmental performance. We empirically tested our hypotheses based on survey data gathered from 327 IT users and managers of 83 Brazilian companies. The results indicate that Green IT sourcing, Green IT policy and Green IT monitoring have a significant and positive effect on Green IT implementation practices, standing out Green IT sourcing as the main predictor. Still, the relationship between Green IT adoption and Environmental performance is also positive and significant, meaning that improvements in Green IT implementation are associated to improvements in environmental performance – considering the environmental impact provided by IT, the efficiency of the IT operations and the environmental awareness of the employees.