Environmental standards and labor productivity: Understanding the mechanisms that sustain sustainability

Abstract

Summary In the last decade, a rising number of firms have adopted voluntary international environmental management and product standards, such as the international ISO 14001 management standard or organic certification. Although emerging research analyzes the impact of these standards on environmental and financial performance, there is to our knowledge no empirical research on how they affect the productivity of employees. In this paper, we investigate the direct relationship between environmental standards and labor productivity, as well as two mediating mechanisms through which environmental standards influence labor productivity: employee training and enhanced interpersonal contacts within the firm. Our empirical results, based on a French employer–employee survey from 5220 firms, reveal that firms that have adopted environmental standards enjoy a one standard deviation higher labor productivity than firms that have not adopted such standards. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Investigating the barriers of the green human resource management implementation in oil industry

“…He concluded that green organization would require to use learning in association with environment and sustainability as an intrinsic and continuous part of the social responsibility process. In other words, training and development are essential elements in the implementation of green management (Delmas & Pekovic, 2013). Training and developmental processes are appropriate mechanisms to facilitate corporate sustainability and pro-environmental practices, which in turn can create an opportunity to develop intellectual capital (Olusanya, 2013).…”

“…Correa et al (2013) stated that many firms may use green human recourse management, have benefited from their implementation, their employees have a better morale and green organizations have better financial performance. Any adoption of environmental standards helps firms profit from reducing their negative environmental effect by improving their labor productivity (Delmas & Pekovic, 2013). Now, according to these expression and also the importance of this issue in the oil industry, we need to investigate the barriers on green human resources management in the industry, and this article aims to identify barriers of implementing green human resources management in Iran's oil industry.…”

Do responsible employers attract responsible employees?

“…Three studies using data for French firms and employees find that, for firms that have adopted voluntary environmental standards, employees are more likely to work uncompensated overtime hours [4], labor productivity is higher [7], and difficulties with recruitment are smaller [8]. Nevertheless, when we look at these issues at an aggregated level, it is not easy to see through all the identification and interpretation problems that they present to the researcher.…”

Pourquoi s’engager volontairement dans la transition énergétique ? Enseignements de la littérature sur la responsabilité sociale et environnementale des entreprises

“…Ainsi, Toyota a annoncé en 2007 que les absences des employés sur son site de Torrance (CA customer service) ont été réduites de 14 % après qu'ils aient étaient transférés dans des bâtiments écologiques (Carlton, 2007). De même, Delmas et Pekovic (2013) …”