Environmental Protection in Environmentally Reactive Firms: Lessons from Corporate Argentina

Diego Vázquez-Brust, Catherine Liston-Heyes

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Abstract

We propose a model of planned corporate environmental behaviour that emphasises the values and attitudes of managers towards the environment, environmental intentions and the context in which these intentions are formed and translated into actual performance. In particular, we focus on the extent to which environmentally reactive (as oppose to pro-active) managers influence the environmental performance of their firms. We identify the factors that mitigate or accentuate the effects of environmental “reactivism” – i.e. a mind-set shared by those who assign to the state the responsibility of protecting the environment. We generate a series of hypotheses and use structural equation modelling to test them in the context of a unique data-set of Argentinean firms. Our system’s approach to corporate environmental behaviour explains approximatively 70% of the variation in reported environmental performance across firms while highlighting elements of the model that may potentially be influenced by policy. Amongst other things, our empirical results suggest that stakeholder pressures can be an effective tool in the development of pro-environmental attitudes (and environmental intentions in the case of small firms) and in so doing offset some of the negative effects of environmental reactivism on environmental performance. Our paper highlights a number of other important implications for the design and implementation of environmental policies that account for human managerial determinants of corporate behaviour and social factors
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)361-379
Number of pages19
JournalJournal of Business Ethics
Volume135
Issue number2
Early online date29 Nov 2014
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2016

Keywords

  • environmental behavior, environmental management, structural equation modelling, Argentina,

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