The importance of quality management for the effectiveness of environmental management: evidence from companies located in Brazil

Abstract

Recent discussions in the specialised literature support that quality management influences the level and maturity of environmental management practices; however, in searches performed in the ISI Web of Science and Scopus databases, it was verified that there is a need for research to portray this relationship quantitatively, especially when it comes to companies located in Brazil. Thus, this research aims to explore this gap: does quality management positively influence the adoption of environmental practices in companies located in Brazil? Therefore, a conceptual grounding on the aforementioned issues was carried out and, based on this, the questionnaire used for the empirical phase of the research was constructed, being a self-administered e-survey with 104 companies of all sizes and sectors located in Brazil. The results demonstrated that, in fact, quality management positively influences environmental management practices. In addition, it was verified that the size of the companies and ISO 14001 certification are significant to control environmental management practices. To date, it is believed that this is the first study that shows a survey to test the relationship between quality management and environmental management practices in companies in Brazil.

Keywords:

• quality management
• environmental management
• environmental management practices
• maturity of environmental management
• structural equation modelling
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Comissão de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal do Nível Superior (CAPES) for supporting the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Adriano Alves Teixeira http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1669-4073

Charbel José Chiappetta Jabbour http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6143-4924