Management and employee involvement in achieving an environmental action-based competitive advantage: an empirical study

Abstract

The objective of this work is to conduct an empirical study that shows whether certain management and human resource factors influence the achievement of an environmental action-based competitive advantage in a company. To this end, we have taken a sample of 110 factories. Management's deep involvement and its strategic integration, as well as employee motivation and participation, have a positive impact on the achievement of an environmental action-based competitive advantage in a company.

Keywords:

• Environmental management
• human resource management
• environmental strategic integration
• motivation
• empowerment
• competitive advantage

Acknowledgements

This work has been financed by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (SEC2003-05238). We thank the referees for their comments and suggestions, which we believe have improved the content and style of the paper.

Notes

1 There are no rules that guarantee a high rate of response in a study with these characteristics (Dennis, 2003). In order to improve it we have included several kinds of the incentives that are traditionally used (Cycyota and Harrison, 2002). However, many of these studies do in fact coincide in that following up on and reminding the respondents has a positive effect, as does having a University sponsor the study, communication prior to sending out the questionnaire, guaranteeing anonymity, and using non-financial incentives (for example, sending previously conducted studies to the factories participating in the study or committing to send them the outcomes of the study or any other kind of information related to the issues put forth in the questionnaire) (Dennis, 2003). Therefore, before sending out the questionnaire, we phoned the person in charge of environmental issues – to whom the questionnaire was addressed – to inform him/her that he/she would be receiving it shortly. In this way, we could be sure that we were dealing with the person in charge of the company's environmental activity. As a result, the study's internal validity was assured. A letter that offered an in-depth explanation of the reasons for performing the study and the objectives it pursued accompanied the questionnaire. In addition, this letter also stated the firm commitment to continue sending information of interest regarding issues related to the factory's environmental management. On the other hand, and at the same time the questionnaire was sent out, two additional documents were provided to the respondents. Finally, we have made a commitment to the factories that participated in the study in the sense that we will send them the report containing the global results of this study. We used all of these incentives in an attempt to improve the response rate, which tends to be rather low when conducting studies in Spanish factories, especially if said studies have to do with the analysis of environmental issues (Brío et al., 2002). This fact is partially explained because we should face a key barrier of the environmental management: the lack of workers. Pretests and other interviews with the factories' environmental managers have shown that there were few workers in the factories. This is a reason to justify our rate of response.

2 The food industry was taken as a basis. If any of the other variables representative of the different sectors was representative, it would mean that the probability of companies' from that sector responding is significantly different from that of companies in the food industry.

3 This allowed us to support the study's external validity.