Factors Affecting the Green Housing Purchasing

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2. Literature Review 2.1 Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) This study employed “Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)” developed by Ajzen (1991) as a tool in modeling intention to buy a green housing. TPB, introduced for the first time by Ajzen (1985), was developed from the theory of reasoned action (TRA) which was accepted as the first theory that tried to explain and forecast human behavior. Due to weakness of TRA forecasting ability, Ajzen later developed TPB by adding a variable reflecting a person’s perceived behavior control and TPB outperformed TRA in predicting and explaining human behavior. Han and Kim (2010) studied customers’ decision to stay in a green hotel by adopting TRA and TPB. They found that TPB can predict customers’ behavior on staying in a green hotel more accurately than TRA. Under TPB, Ajzen (1985) mentioned that important factors which influenced person’s behavior intention and his/her specific behavior are attitude towards behavior, subjective norm, and perceived behavior control. 2.1.1 Attitude towards the behavior (ATB) Attitude towards behavior is the degree of an individual’s favorable or unfavorable on performing a behavior (Tonglet, Phillips, and Reed, 2004), or an individual’s overall evaluation of a specific behavior (Han, Hsu and Sheu, 2010). According to Ajzen and Fishbein (2004), general attitude has lower power than both positive and negative attitude in predicting a particular behavior. ATB, thus, is self evaluation towards a particular behavior which will reflect beliefs of a person on the perceived outcomes or benefits that a person will get from expressing that behavior (Ajzen, 1991; Shim, Eastlick, Lotz and Warrington, 2001). Many research papers found a positive relationship between attitude towards behavior and behavior intention, for example, in the field of physical activity (Jackson, Smith and Conner, 2003; French et al., 2005), internet stock trade (Gopi and Ramayah, 2007), and online shopping (Shim et al., 2001). Some researchers have studied factors affecting behavior intention in a household recycling behavior, green hotel repurchasing, and green product consumption, they found a positive relationship between an affective attitude towards behavior and behavior intention (Tonglet et al., 2004; Han and Kim, 2010; Kim and Han, 2010). 2.1.2 Subjective norm (SN) Subjective norm is awareness of social pressure affecting an individual’s behavior intention. Such pressure is perceived as important influence to attitude or behavior (Ajzen, 1991; Tonglet et al., 2004; Han and Kim, 2010; Kim and Han, 2010). Subjective norm is a function of normative beliefs. It is an individual’s beliefs affected by important others such as family members who think that an individual should or should not perform a particular behavior (Rivis and Sheeran, 2003). Moreover, it also plays an important part in determining environmentally friendly behavior. According to the study by Gupta and Ogden (2009), even though consumers have positive attitude towards an environmentally friendly or green consumption, they may not buy a green product. Their study signified to the influence of the reference groups, or subjective norm on a particular behavior. Han et al. (2010) had studied the green hotel choice and found that subjective norm had played an important part on an individual’s decision to stay in a green hotel. The result is consistent with a study done by 2
Han and Kim (2010) that subjective norm highly influenced an intention to repeat purchase of a green hotel positively. 2.1.3 Perceived behavior control (PBC) According to the study by Ajzen (1991), perception of an ability (how easy or difficult) to control one’s own behavior plays an important part in predicting behavior intention. Perceived behavioral control referred to one’s own capability in controlling various factors affecting actual behavior (Tonglet et al., 2004; Han et al., 2010; Kim and Han, 2010). Bandura (1991, as cited in Ajzen, 2002) determined self efficacy as one’s own perception of how successful one could execute his/her behavior according to what he/she had planned to perform in order to get an expected outcome. Ajzen (2002) separated one’s own ability to perform a behavior into two which are “perceived behavior control” and “perceived selfefficacy”. Perceived behavior control is degree of controlling one’s own behavior and perceived self-efficacy is conviction to one’s own ability to do something. However, these two are quite similar (Ajzen, 2002, p.668), therefore both are inherited within the perceived behavioral control construct in this study. 2.2 TPB Model in Green Consumption Context In order to add some additional constructs to the original TPB model, those constructs must increase the predictive ability to behavior intention. Additional constructs that are hypothesized to influence behavior intention according to some researchers are as follows. 2.2.1 Environmentally conscious behavior (ECB) This construct sometimes called environmentally significant behavior, environmentally conscious behavior, environmentally friendly behavior, environmentally responsible behavior, environmentally relevant ecological behavior and simply environmental behavior (Urban and Zverinova, 2009). Though many researchers have studied about this context, there is still no agreement on its influence on purchase intention. However, they agree that consumers are motivated to purchase an environmentally friendly product if they are convinced on the importance of environmental problems. Finally, such attitude should be expressed into environmental problem conscious behavior (Thompson, Anderson, Hansen, and Kahle, 2009; Urban and Zverinova, 2009). This kind of behavior should be deep rooted in every step of one’s lifestyle (H’Mida, 2009; Kim and Han, 2010). An individual should perceive an effect of products on an environment and had the purpose to decrease that effect. Environmentally friendly habit will have a direct effect on purchasing environmentally friendly products (Kalafatis, East, Pollard and Tsogas, 1999). However, Han et al. (2010) had studied the effect of environmentally friendly activities on a decision to stay in a green hotel and found that the level of having the environmentally friendly activities had no relationship to the decision. 2.2.2 Economic factors (EC) Economic factors refer to willingness to pay additional money to buy the environmentally friendly products or agreed on paying higher tax to protect the environment (Paco and Raposo, 2009). This price premium means amount of money paid additional to the normal price and is used as an indicator of consumer willingness to pay for a green product 3
Page 1: Factors Affecting Green Housing Pur
Page 5 and 6: Figure 1. The proposed model and hy
Page 7 and 8: Table 1. Factor loading, % variance
Page 9 and 10: the work done by Kim and Han (2010)
Page 11: Paco, A.D., and Raposo, M., 2009. G

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