This study investigates the relationship between environmental strategy and company performance using samples from a nationwide survey. The companies were classified into two groups; environmentally conscious and nonenvironmental companies. Environmental companies reported better performance scores and also are more inclined to incorporate various performance improvement strategies and techniques into their operations.

IntroductionOperations strategy can be viewed as the effective use of production capability and technology for achieving business and corporate goals [1]. These goals include profit, innovations, customizations, product flexibility, product reliability, quality, response, delivery reliability and after sales service [2].Manufacturing organizations today face an array of choices and challenges. The competitive environment for manufacturing firms has led to a process of downsizing paired with technology adoption with the hope of increasing chances for success in the marketplace. Unfortunately, many of the problems that exist for manufacturers are not easily fixed. Hayes and Abernathy[3] identified a set of decision-making failures that have led to a decline in US competitiveness. While their observations reflect a broad spectrum of activities, one that is especially problematic for manufacturers was process design.They were especially concerned that choices in process improvement were focused on short-run payback. Since their work was published, the literature on manufacturing strategy has focused on the notion that technological improvements in process design must be tied with overall firm strategy [4,5]. The underlying premiss of the more recent thinking is that process improvements must be appropriate for the firm. This implies that it is important to select operations strategies that will positively affect organizational performance.Determining which strategies are the most important in terms of impact on the outcomes of the organization is, of course, difficult. Similarly, a determination of the appropriate outcome measures creates additional difficulties in researching operations process questions.Some strategies that are commonly used to enhance organizational performance are total quality management (TQM)[6], just-in-time production methods (JIT) [7], manufacturing cells[8], flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs)[9], concurrent engineering[10], computer networking with suppliers and customers (EDI or variations of EDI) [11], and benchmarking[12]. Many articles have described the benefits and general implementation aspects of these operations strategies [11,[13][14][15][16]. Further, a number of empirical studies [7,17,18] have dealt

No abstract