Green Value Chain Practices in Malaysian Companie

This study investigates the implementation of green value chains in Malaysian organisations and how this enables these organisations to attain competitive advantage. The value chain is an invaluable tool that can be used to assess the value creating activities within organisations and that the efficiency of these inter-related activities would lead to better profit margins and therefore competitive advantage for organisations. Due to the growing need for organisations to be more environmentally friendly, this has resulted in what is termed as the "greening" of the value chains. "Green" in this context refers to making organisations responsive to ecological and health concern. As such, the research problem that has been formulated for this study is "How do green value chain activities that are conducted by companies affect their competitive advantage?" Based on the research problem formulated, two research questions that examine the degree of green value chain activities performed and the role of the green value chain practices towards competitive advantage were identified. This research employs judgemental sampling for the in-depth semi-structured interviews based on the interpretivist research paradigm. To attain the level of theoretical saturation, a total of 35 respondents were interviewed. Findings indicate that the Malaysian companies are already in the process of adopting some green value chain activities in their business practices but they are not fully aware that some of their practices can actually be termed as green value chain activities. They are mainly implementing the activities with the intention to gain cost advantage, enhance the efficiency of their business activities and for some, to obtain differentiation advantage.