Attaining and Enacting Green Leadership: Insights from the Green IT Initiatives of China Mobile

For Green Information Technology (IT) initiatives to have a significant and lasting impact on the environment, they cannot be implemented in isolation. Instead, there is a need for collective action among diverse stakeholders operating in inter-organizational business networks, which in turn, demands an appropriate leadership structure. Yet, the notion of ‘Green Leadership’ has never been explored. Using a case study of the green IT initiatives of China Mobile, the largest mobile telecommunications provider in the world, this study seeks to shed light on the underlying process through which green leadership can be achieved and subsequently enacted to facilitate collective green IT initiatives. With its findings, this study presents an empirically supported process model that complements the dominant internal-oriented perspective of green IT, and provides practitioners with a useful reference for leveraging the collective resources and capabilities of their business network to contribute towards preserving the environment for future generations.