Abstract
The demand for improved environmental practices inside firms has increased around the world. However, in the process of implementation of environmental management, policy may be decoupled from practice, generating doubts about its effectiveness. This study investigates an overlooked middle step in the environmental management process, analyzing the strength of the main environmental drivers in improving environmental practices inside firms. We developed a set of hypotheses about the influence regulation, voluntary norms and stakeholder pressure have upon environmental management practices, considering the institutional context and different enforcement of these drivers. We use a cross-sectional survey of 150 Brazilian firms to gather information about environmental management and test our hypotheses in a Structural Equation Model. The findings confirm the importance of command and control instruments as well as stakeholder pressure in promoting better environmental practices inside firms. Yet, the results demonstrate that voluntary norms did not influence management practices even though they were perceived as a market opportunity.
Highlights
Environmental demands are a fact for firms in most institutional contexts (Child & Tsai, 2005)
We study the influence of main external drivers, governmental regulation, voluntary norms and stakeholder pressure in influencing Brazilian firms’ environmental practices
The hypotheses about the influence of different institutional drivers on environmental management practices were tested using a Structural Equation Modeling estimated via maximum likelihood, with AMOS software version 16.0 (Byrne, 2010)
Summary
Environmental demands are a fact for firms in most institutional contexts (Child & Tsai, 2005). Drivers of environmental behavior come from constituents inside and outside the firm and exert pressure towards the reduction of negative externalities (Aravind & Christmann, 2011; Delmas & Toffel, 2008). These drivers are contingent on their context and may result in different impacts on firms’ environmental management practices (Delmas & Toffel, 2008; López-Gamero, Molina-Azorín, & Claver-Cortés, 2010). Economic expansion has intensified the pressure on the natural environment, there are few studies about environmental management in emerging economies (Aravind & Christmann, 2011; Child & Tsai, 2005; Gavronski, Paiva, Teixeira, & Andrade, 2012)
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