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‘Green’ Human Resource Benefits: Do they Matter as Determinants of Environmental Management System Implementation?

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Abstract

This article analyses whether benefits arising for human resource management from environmental management activities drive environmental management system implementation. Focusing on employee satisfaction and recruitment/retention, it tests this for German manufacturing firms in 2001 and 2006 and incorporates a rare longitudinal element into the analysis. It confirms positive associations of the benefit levels for both variables with environmental management system implementation on a large scale. Also it provides evidence that increasing levels of environmental management system implementation result from higher economic benefits in the human resource domain. In doing so the article supplies needed quantitative evidence on important aspects of how sustainability relates to human resource management.

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Notes

  1. Whilst analysing the relationship of social performance (i.e. social sustainability) with economic performance has generally preceded the analysis of the link between environmental and economic performance, with the first studies being carried out as early as in the early 1970s (Pava and Krausz 1996), the late consideration of social sustainability in the context of the HR function is likely due to the late consolidation of the latter in the corporate context. Several studies have indicated that the causality could also run from economic to environmental performance (Orlitzky 2008) and this is accounted for when developing hypotheses in that they built on an integrated perspective with reciprocal causality as the underlying notion

  2. Grouping the respondent categories in HR-related ones (HR managers, managing directors, and chief operating officers, which jointly accounted for 31 % of the respondents in 2001 and 33 % in 2006) and other ones (quality management, environmental management, production) and comparing these and respondents with unknown function by means of ANOVA and Scheffé tests shows that only few significant differences exist. This suggests that it is acceptable to pool different types of respondents in the analysis.

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  1. Department of Economics and Business Administration, Julius Maximilians University, Stephanstr. 1, 97070, Wuerzburg, Germany

    Marcus Wagner

  2. Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée, Université de Strasbourg, 61 av. de la Fôret Noire, 68000, Strasbourg, France

    Marcus Wagner

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Table 6 Overview of survey questions and items used (DV: dependent, IV: independent variable)
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Wagner, M. ‘Green’ Human Resource Benefits: Do they Matter as Determinants of Environmental Management System Implementation?. J Bus Ethics 114, 443–456 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1356-9

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