Consistency and 'awareness gaps' in the environmental behaviour of Hungarian companies

This paper is designed to provide a contribution to the analysis of corporate environmental awareness, describing the concept along its five components: environmental knowledge, values, attitudes, revealed willingness to act and actual behaviour. Due to research experiences companies’ environmental behaviour is not always consistent in practice, which indicates “gaps” emerging between and within awareness components. A questionnaire-based analysis of 466 Hungarian manufacturing companies shows that environmental knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for adequate organisational behaviour; the impact of favourable attitudes and willingness to act is more essential and can override the impact of knowledge. However, “gaps” also exist between attitudes and actions, as well as within components of corporate environmental awareness which makes the resulting organisational behaviour different from expected.