Does Adoption of Management Standards Deliver Efficiency Gain in Firms’ Pursuit of Sustainability Performance? An Empirical Investigation of Chinese Manufacturing Firms

Xiaoling Wang,Haiying Lin,Olaf Weber

doi:10.3390/su8070694

Xiaoling Wang, Haiying Lin + Show 1 more

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Building on longitudinal data from 73 Chinese manufacturing firms during 2009–2012, we assess whether and how firms gain higher efficiency in achieving their sustainability goals by adopting management practice standards (ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and/or OHSAS 18001). We propose four pathways for firms to gain sustainability efficiency in their certification journey: participation, qualitative integration, quantitative expansion, and temporal accumulation. Our results confirm that firms certifying management standards gain higher efficiency in pursuing their sustainability goals than firms without these standards. We also find some support for increased efficiency effect in firms with diverse management systems over firms with only a single certificate in 2011. Finally, our results highlight the experiential and temporal accumulation effect of such efficiency gains, that is, firms with prior certification experience or having a longer certification history demonstrate higher efficiency gains in pursuing their sustainability goals.

Highlights

In recent years, certifiable standards of management practices, such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and OHSAS 18001, have been increasingly adopted by businesses around the world
Due to the potential benefits associated with the combination of varied management standards, we propose that: Hypothesis 2: Firms with a variety of certification standards obtain greater efficiency in their pursuit of sustainability than firms with homogeneous certification standard
China is famous as the factory to the world, yet it is a late mover in adopting management system certification and corporate social responsibility (CSR)

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Certifiable standards of management practices, such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and OHSAS 18001, have been increasingly adopted by businesses around the world. These standards focus on the implementation of control systems, the central purpose of which is to manage corporate environmental and social responsibility (CSR) [1,2]. Question whether these certificates lead to genuine sustainable development performance [5,6], in part because these standards’ focus on processes rather than firms’ actual performance [7], and in part due to the increased organizational complexity and operating costs related to the certification and implementation process [8]

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