Abstract

The aim of this research is to verify the relationship between the maturity levels of environmental man-agement and the adoption of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices by electro-electroniccompanies in Brazil. In this work a two-phase research was conducted, with one quantitative and theother qualitative. The quantitative phase aimed to test whether a relationship between the maturitylevels of environmental management and GSCM exists, while the qualitative phase tried to detail thecharacteristics of this relationship. The quantitative phase was conducted through a survey with 100Brazilian electro-electronic companies and the collected data were processed using Structural EquationModeling. For the qualitative phase, a multiple case study was conducted with three companies locatedin Brazil. The results indicate that: (1) The main hypothesis was confirmed and considered statisticallyvalid, indicating that, indeed, the maturity level of environmental management influences the adoptionof GSCM practices; (2) a coevolution tends to occur between the environmental maturity and the GSCMpractices; that is, the more developed is the company's environmental management, more complex GSCMpractices are adopted; and (3) the GSCM internal practices tend to present a greater relative adoptionthan the external practices; these external practices of GSCM tend to be adopted when the company isinserted in a higher environmental stage and/or operates under a scenario of stronger normative envi-ronmental pressure. By the way, this is the first research mixing survey and case studies on GSCM inBrazil. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.