Quality and environmental management practices: their linkages with safety performance

Abstract

There is a widespread acknowledgement that quality and environmental practices are effective means for improving the business performance of firms. However, empirical evidence regarding the relationship between quality and environmental practices and employee safety performance is relatively scarce. In order to fill this gap, we investigate the relationship between quality and environmental practices and safety performance measured by employee accidents at work. Employing a multivariate probit model, we show that the adoption of quality management practices is associated with an increased chance that an employee encounters workplace accidents, whilst environmental practices are associated with a reduction in workplace accidents. However, when distinguishing between workplace accidents that do and do not lead to sick leave, our results reveal that the utilisation of quality practices is not associated to employees’ probability of encountering accidents that lead to sick leave. This suggests that quality practices are only related to benign accidents. Moreover, examining the interrelationships among quality practices, safety performance and quality-related contextual factors, our findings indicate that the implementation of quality practices by the firm that considers quality as very important for its strategy and provides employee’s quality-related training is not associated with safety performance. Therefore, the results suggest that the way a firm implements and uses quality practices is essential for their effect on safety performance.

Keywords:

• quality practices
• environmental practices
• workplace accidents

Acknowledgements

Sanja Pekovic started this paper when she was a PhD student at Centre d’études de l’emploi and University Paris-Est. Sanja Pekovic gratefully acknowledges the financial support for this work from the AFNOR ‘Performance des Organisations’ endowment in collaboration with the Paris-Dauphine Foundation.

Notes

1. ISO website: www.iso.org.

2. More details about the design and scope of this survey are available on www.enquetecoi.net.

3. ISO website: www.iso.org.

4. Because of the table’s length we do not report Pearson correlation coefficients for these variables. The results are available from the author upon request.

5. The results are available from the authors upon request.

6. Unfortunately, we cannot examine the impact of environmental practices on workplace accidents with and without sick leave, since the CT database does not provide information on environmental practices.

7. The results are available from the authors upon request.