2.5.2. Manager Education Level

This paper distinguishes the educational competencies of managers as they could play an essential role in PRAC (secondary, undergraduate and graduate). Vila et al. [45] indicated that there are significant effects of these competencies on the possibility that managers act as drivers in PRAC. These competencies are directly related to the level of education as they are based on being alert to new opportunities and the ability to present ideas or reports, mobilize the skills of others and propose new ideas and solutions as well as the ability to use computers and the Internet. Therefore, the high technological level of a firm is directly linked to the education of the manager and his level of awareness about investing in ITS and PRAC. The technological level creates effects of power in the PRAC and reduces the risk of resistance of the administrators to the new systems [46]. Ultimately, introducing a business process system without a supportive learning environment could have drastic consequences [47].

However, it is important to test this in our research models because, in turn, a higher level of manager education can mean that the manager has a greater knowledge of certain environmental issues related to ethics when it comes to doing things well or not achieving the adoption of environmental practices in the firm. For example, a manager may be educated on how to implement a certain quota for pollution in his firm, but this knowledge can also be used to circumvent the ethical mechanisms to comply with said quota if using the black market to buy and sell pollution quotas. Therefore, our research models aim to show whether a manager's level of education is a factor that leads to the adoption of environmental practices or their absence [48].

Both the size of a firm and the characteristics of the manager (level of education and experience) are relevant factors included in our research models and, therefore, in our qualitative analyses, because they are factors that, a priori, can affect the adoption of environmental practices in firms in a predefined way. In this sense, large firms are expected to adopt environmental practices in a very different way than small ones do, and the same is expected in the case of manager characteristics—that is, a manager with a high level of education and experience will apply environmental practices to his firm in a very different way than a manager with a lower level of education and experience would.
