Manager's attitude toward environment

The purpose of this paper is to analyze corporate environmental awareness in an international cross‐section and to explore whether attitudes towards environmental issues mirror the development of an economy. Thus, do more advanced societies represent more progressive attitudes? How significant are differences in perception between countries?

The empirical research was conducted in three countries. In total, 200 managers in public and private corporations nationwide were selected in Australia and Ukraine. In Poland the population of managers was 250. The study instrument was a two‐part survey. The first part concerned ecological awareness understood as a conglomerate of knowledge, values and attitudes. The second part of the survey concerned convictions and opinions pertaining to ecological issues. Responses were given in an interval response scale, on a 1‐5 rating scale for a particular question.

The research shows that in companies in some countries there are “gaps within awareness components”, and hence between convictions, ecological values and a readiness to take action. Moreover, an awareness gap has been diagnosed between more and less developed countries. So, the studies conducted showed that the perception of a kind of environmental threats changes together with socio‐economic development.

Several analyses of attitudes towards various dimensions of the environment can be found in the literature. This paper focuses not on a general level of ecological awareness of the public but on managers' attitude towards environment. Issues concerning the ecological awareness of a selected group (population) are sporadically presented in the literature. Limited research to date has been undertaken with respect to managerial attitudes towards environmental issues. To the best of the author's knowledge there is no evidence which would enable a comparison of the level of awareness of Polish and Ukrainian managers and managers from other countries. The contribution of the paper to the literature is twofold: first, it complements the knowledge on managers' attitude towards environment in the studied countries. Second, it shows the relations between the level of socio‐economic growth and the attitude.