Sustainable Buying and Buyer Performance: Evidence from a Ghanaian Perspective

Purpose- The purpose of this paper is to examine sustainable buying and its impact on buyer performance using Colleges of Education. This paper is a quantitative analysis based on seven Colleges of Education. Non-probability sampling techniques are used for choosing the unit of analysis. Also, data was collected through a well-structured questionnaire. The study found that the aspects of sustainable buying (Env, Soc, Eco) lead to improved buying performance. The study identified that buying performance is affected by e-buying systems, communication, organizational culture, business strategy, and size of organization, information available and monitoring. The study further discovered that the benefits of sustainable buying are improved quality of products, market expansion, increased intangible savings, reduced harmful emission of gas, value for money and increased efficiency in energy consumption. The study established the challenges of sustainable buying to be ineffective leadership, inadequate buying policies, budgetary constraint, inadequate compliance inspectors, lack of supplier collaboration and lack of capacity. Research limitations- the sample size is still limited and in future a quantitative analysis should be used. The study is limited in terms of the geographical area. The findings of the study are more likely to be held for other schools in all emerging market contexts. However, the applicability of these findings to other contexts needs further investigations. While interest on sustainable buying is increasing in emerging markets, there is little written on sustainable buying and its impact from the perspective of researchers from such market. Therefore, the impact of sustainable buying on buying performance has not been investigated so far.