Institutional Pressures and Sustainable Performance Of Ghana’s Food and Beverage Manufacturing Firms: The Mediating Role of Sustainability Culture

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years, business stakeholders have been worried about Ghana's food and beverage firms' operational quality and presence owing to unsustainable practices such as high greenhouse gas emissions, an increase in foodborne infections, biodiversity loss, and consumer discontent. Scholars have failed to question whether Ghana's food and beverage businesses follow institutional pressures and have a sustainable culture. This study examines the effect of institutional pressures on the sustainable performance of Ghana’s Food and Beverage manufacturing firms with mediating role of sustainability culture. The Institutional and Resource-Based view theories underpinned the study and it employed both a quantitative approach and an explanatory design. A randomly sampled respondents from 216 registered Ghanaian Food and Beverage manufacturing firms were used for the study. Data were processed using PLS-SEM version 3.2 and SPSS version 26. The study found that mimetic pressures influenced the sustainable performance of Ghana’s Food and Beverage manufacturing enterprises. Normative and coercive pressures did not significantly affect sustainable performance. Normative pressure did not affect sustainability culture, whereas coercive and mimetic pressures did. Also, sustainability culture was found to have a significant impact on the sustainable performance of Ghanaian food and beverage firms. Sustainability culture mediated the predictive relationships between coercive (full) and mimetic (partial) pressures and sustainable performance. It was concluded that a sustainability culture improves the tendency of Food and Beverage firms to comply with external business pressures to improve sustainable outcomes. Management of food and beverage firms should invest to make sustainable considerations critical to their business operations.