Linking Employee Stakeholders to Environmental Performance: The Role of Proactive Environmental Strategies and Shared Vision

Managing Carbon Aspirations: The Influence of Corporate Climate Change Targets on Environmental Performance

“…Consistent with our hypotheses, while we find no overall effect of setting climate change targets on emissions, we show that targets characterized by a commitment to more ambitious emissions reductions, a longer target time frame, and Interest in business responses to climate change is reflected in the significant growth of research especially on the strategies and practices that aim to reduce firms' carbon footprints 1 (Aragón-Correa et al 2016;Delmas and Toffel 2008;Hahn et al 2015;Wright and Nyberg 2016). Despite increasing scrutiny and pressure to address environmental issues associated with their activities, empirical evidence suggests that firms' commitment to improving environmental impacts varies significantly due to the cognitive, strategic, technical, and managerial challenges in operating in more sustainable ways (Alt et al 2015;Hussain et al 2016;Post et al 2015). Prior research has identified a number of reasons for businesses to engage in environmental management, including pre-empting or responding to regulatory pressures (Berrone and Gomez-Mejia 2009;Boiral 2007;Delmas and Toffel 2008;Delmas and Montes-Sancho 2010), reducing costs by eliminating waste (Porter and Van der Linde 1995), attracting environmentally conscious customers, employees, and investors (Alt et al 2015;Flammer 2013), and building and sustaining legitimacy among external stakeholders, often by imitating peer organizations (Bansal 2005;Bansal and Clelland 2004;Berrone et al 2017).…”

Engaging small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the low carbon agenda

“…Their motivations range from the business case through to wanting to 'do the right thing'. There did not appear to be any evidence that the respondents acted as a result of the need to gain legitimacy in its local community [32,[38][39][40]. There is a lot of empirical evidence from this study and from others (such as van Hemel et al [30]) that SMEs are more compelled by either current or potential regulation to invest in low carbon activities as a way to move beyond the perceived 'lack of relevance' of some measures to SMEs.…”

“…For those SMEs who are owner-managed or family owned, there is less pressure from the traditional shareholder (as in larger companies) to react to specific issues, such as low carbon [25,37]. However, many owner-managers feel a heightened sense of responsibility to be more aware of their environmental impacts because of their size and dependency on their local community around them [24] (a form of legitimacy theory [38][39][40]), and this will also tailor their reaction to low carbon initiatives. In order to gain legitimacy in the local community and to attract/retain employees or to improve their reputation management [32], an SME may well be more attuned to their employee/local community stakeholder group than a large company [24].…”

Putting environmental technologies into the mainstream: Adoption of environmental technologies by medium-sized manufacturing firms in Brazil

“…However, one should not rely solely on the support from the senior management team but also on the support and understanding of the employees who will use and be empowered by the new technologies and practices. According to Alt et al (2014), employees have unique knowledge of firms, which promotes environmental improvement. Finally, according to Klassen and Whybark (1999), developing more advanced environmental management requires companies to adopt pollution-prevention technologies, which are intensive in human knowledge.…”