Identification and selection of environmental performance indicators: Application of the balanced scorecard approach

The popular “balanced scorecard” system can be applied in the selection and development of environmental performance indicators. As presented, the balanced scorecard integrates environmental performance within the context of corporate strategic objectives. The basic premise of the balanced scorecard is that the ultimate corporate objectives commonly targeted by senior management such as economic value-added, net income, return, on equity, and return on assets are of little use in day-to-day dicision-making or in the motivation of employeesRather than look ahead, these measures reflect the past and, therefore, are not closely linked with the immediate actions which might be expected to be associated with future performance improvements. To create incentives for future improvement in these long-term measures, we must develop “leading” measures, which can be easily monitored in the short term. Such an approach lends itself to the selection of environmental performance indicators which are most clearly associated with the firm's strategic goals.     

Supply chain environmental management: Elements for success

As environmental concerns reach the corporate boardrooms and the offices of upper management, firms continue to struggle with improving environmental performance throughout the entire organization. While changing the environmental performance from within is difficult, it is even more difficult to move outside of the organization. This process is especially challenging as firms look to improve environmental performance throughout the entire supply chain.In this article, Steve Lippman, the program manager in the Business and Environmental Program at Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), reports on the latest thingking in supply chain environmental management. The article shares the lessons that BSR has learned from leading firms about the types of activities companies are undertaking to influence their suppliers, the characteristics of effective supply chain environmental management programs, and the key steps for initiating or expanding these activities.     

Fiduciary obligation and the importance of an environmental accounting standard

Financial measurement is currently the key to the analysis of corporate performance. To date, analysts have not considered the environmental impact of corporate behavior—much less a wider view of social and economic impacts. Environmental sustainability reports, though still an emerging reporting tool, can begin to address the obligations of fiduciaries to look beyond short-term financial reports to a more complete understanding of a firm's long-term impact on worlwide issues of environmental, social and economic well-being. Environmental reports can frame the strategic planning of a company within the context of its natural supply chains, the approval of its customers, and the world in which workers play and live. Successes and failures are measured and reported to allow managers to adjust plans as necessary. The competitive instinct of corporate managers can be tapped through comparative reports to catalyze invention or imaginative programs that save environmental and corporate resources. Joan Bavaria discusses corporate transparency in terms of environmental reports, through the Global Reporting Initiative that is being organized by CERES (The Coalition of Environmentally Responsible Economies). One potential result of a common reporting format would be that investors, operating in a climate of expanded concepts of fiducial responsibility, could make choices consistent with the goals of sustainable enterprise.     

“减规模”还是“增绿色”?异质性环保政策工具下的企业环保行为响应

市场机制和绿色投资型环保政策工具既是对命令控制型工具的有益补充,也可能在企业层面引致更加复杂的环保行为响应,企业“减规模”抑或“增绿色”还存在不确定性。为此,本文借助计量模型,基于2011-2019年重污染上市公司的微观数据,探讨企业在不同政策工具下的环保行为响应。研究发现：各类环保政策工具的“增绿色”属性突出;环境监管和排污收费均引致企业环保支出和绿色创新水平提升的“增绿色”响应;环保补助则带来企业以环保支出为主的“增绿色”响应;环境监管和排污收费两种政策工具并不相容,互相阻滞了对环保支出的激励效应;宽松的融资约束和富有的企业家精神将放大排污收费的“增绿色”效果,而环保补助对引导融资约束下的“增绿色”响应更加有效。本文结论启示环保部门需了解不同政策工具的异质性后果,合理进行工具组合,并面向不同特征企业精准施策。     

Encouraging Environmental Accounting Worldwide: A Survey of Government Policies and Instruments

Government involvement is a critical factor for the corporate accountability for the environment. Environmental accounting is an effective tool for a company's greener management practice. It also reveals potential cost reduction and profit maximization opportunities, thus encourages environmentally and socially sound management and decision-making practice. This article exams the strengths and weaknesses of options available to governments to promote corporate environment accounting. Corporate environmental accounting is considered a strategic management tool for the improvement of corporate management and decision-making practices.In general, the policy instruments that used by government can be categorized into: (1) regulatory; (2) voluntary; (3) incentive based; (4) informational; and (5) cooperative instruments. These options are currently being used by various governmental agencies globally in the promotion of corporate environmental accounting. After the evaluation of various kinds of policy instruments, the author concludes that information-based, voluntary and cooperative policy instruments are most effective for promoting corporate environmental accounting practices. The common factor for these mechanisms is the flow of critical information.     

Effective responses to public reviews: An environmental manager's perspective at Phillips Petroleum Company

The scrutiny of corporate performance has escalated with the advent of Internet communications and attention by third-party public interest groups to the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic and environmental performance. Despite the attention that Philips Petroleum has paid to developing an environmental management system that meets or exceeds ISO 1400 standards—and their participation as a lead company in developing the PERI (Public Environmental Reporting Initiative) standards—Philips found themselves at the tail-end of a ranking of oil refineries by the Council on Economic Priorities.In this article, Barbara Price, Vice President of Health, Environment and Safety (HSE) at Phillips Petroleum, describes a positive approach in communications strategy that works when the results from an external review process are unexpectedly negative.     

Biodiversity: new trends in Environmental Management

For a variety of reasons, biodiversity is currently an important issue, and increasingly seen as a problem over which the corporate sector needs to take ownership. There are dramatic statistics about the decline of biodiversity, and the corporate sector is both partially responsible and subject to its impacts. This means that for most companies, the environmental goal posts are starting to move: having an Environmental Management System which controls waste and energy is now the lowest standard; the bench-mark of best practice is a sustainability strategy whose environmental aspect integrates biodiversity into the EMS. This can be achieved through company Biodiversity Action Plans, and an increasing body of best practice exists highlighting this approach.     

Crafting effective environmental strategies: A “model of learning” from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries

While creating and implementing effective environmental strategies, firms collect and process information from many interconnected “learning environmental.”These “models of learning” serve to develop environmental knowledge and cultural beliefs that guide, coordinate and synchronize actions at the corporate and subsidiary levels. In this way, best environmental practice becomes institutionalized within the organization.This article examines both the formal and informal processes that firms use to identify and transform environmental strategies into accepted organizational practices. Environmental, health and safety (EH & S) managers, in particular, should embrace the notion that systematically gathering and sharing such information across the organization can have profound implications for a firm's environmental performance. Firms that capture and disseminate the critical environmental knowledge of their members can be well positioned to attain environmental leadership roles in their industries.     

我国上市公司董事会效率与公司绩效的实证研究

董事会效率是指董事会各项职能发挥的效果,包括董事会的制度建设、董事会的结构设置、董事会战略决策能力以及对管理层经营行为的监控效率。本文从影响董事会效率的因素出发,以我国上市公司2000-2003年样本公司为统计数据,对董事会效率进行了实证研究。首先,通过董事会效率的各因素与公司绩效之间的多元回归分析,建立了董事会效率的测评模型,借助该模型可对我国上市公司的董事会效率实施测评。利用董事会效率测评结果,对我国上市公司的董事会效率与公司绩效的关联关系进行实证研究。研究结果显示,董事会效率与公司绩效之间存在正相关关系,公司绩效会随着董事会效率的增强而提高。同时结果表明,目前我国上市公司董事会效率普遍偏低。因而,提高我国上市公司董事会效率需要设置合理的董事会规模、保持适当的独立董事比例、提高董事会决策效率、增大董事持股比例以及提升董事会对管理层的监控效率。     

The evolution of industrial environmental performance metrics: Trends and challenges

Environmental performance metrics are measuring sticks against which companies can gauge their progress toward environmental goals and related business strategies. Good metrics represent information that has been purposefully distilled into manageable bits that help focus attention on key issues. For example, a particular compliance goal may require tracking the mass or concentration of regulated substances that are released to the environment. Progress toward meeting an internal goal of reducing materials or eliminating targeted substances from the waste stream may be tracked by measuring the mass of material inputs and outputs. These metrics, when compared to an appropriate benchmark, such as a regulatory standard or an industry average, give a company some means of assessing its performance. A comprehensive set of metrics can assist management to direct corporate resources toward the most processing problems and identify the most cost efficient manner of addressing them. They can also be used by companies to communicate the details of their environmental performance to customers, investors and other external audiences.     

企业领导者的社会责任取向、企业社会表现和组织绩效的关系研究

企业领导者的社会责任取向、企业社会表现和组织绩效存在一定关系。根据以往的研究,企业社会责任取向包括经济取向、法律取向、伦理取向和慈善取向4个维度。在研究中,把企业社会表现拟合为员工、消费者、股东、强制环保、自觉环保、社区和特殊群体7个因子,把组织绩效分为市场绩效、财务绩效和人力绩效3个因子。研究发现,在企业社会责任取向、企业社会表现和组织绩效3者的关系中,企业社会表现起着中介作用。此外,对国外学者设计的企业社会责任取向问卷进行了本土化,并首次将企业社会责任取向、企业社会表现和组织绩效纳入一个研究框架中。     

高管团队职能异质性与企业绩效关系研究:基于管理者认知和团队冲突的中介分析

高管团队的职能特征如何反映到企业绩效中一直是管理领域研究的重点,但是其实证检验结果呈现出复杂化的特征,一致性的结论尚未达成。本文从高阶梯理论和信息处理理论出发,较为全面地探索高管团队职能异质性如何影响企业绩效。研究结果表明:(1)高管团队职能异质性对企业绩效水平有负向的影响;(2)高管团队职能异质性会显著促进管理者认知集中性和复杂性的提高;(3)管理者认知集中性和复杂性的提高会进一步促进绩效水平的提高;(4)管理者认知是高管团队职能异质性影响企业绩效水平的中介机制;(5)高管团队职能异质性的提高会显著促进团队冲突的提高;(6)团队冲突的增强会抑制企业绩效水平的提高;(7)团队冲突是职能异质性影响企业绩效水平的中介机制。     

企业环保导向、环保策略与绩效关系研究——来自武汉城市圈“两型社会”建设试验区的调查

在可持续发展理论、利他行为理论和企业环境管理的基础上,建立了企业环保导向、环保策略(行为)与企业绩效关系模型;运用层次回归分析法,检验武汉城市圈"两型社会"建设试验区内304家食品企业在嵌入"两型社会"的利他环保观念和环保行为后,对企业绩效产生的影响。结果表明,企业利己环保导向和利他环保导向并不矛盾,可以并存,且对企业绩效存在正相关关系,嵌入利他性的环保导向后,企业利己环保导向对企业绩效影响减弱;虽然企业环保行为仍然偏好产后污染治理("管末"策略),但利他环保导向却显著促进了企业基于环保的组织和战略创新("管前"策略)以及经营过程的环保策略("管中"策略)转变,并显著正向影响企业绩效。     

Environmental Management — the European Way

While international agreements, international standards, and internationally operating companies have left behind the idea of national borders for environmental management issues, research is still lagging behind in describing developments in this area from an international perspective. The European Business Environmental Barometer (EBEB) is a quantitative survey of the state and development of environmental management in Europe and one of the first to regularly provide results on this issue at a European level. It covers topics such as perceived environmental impact, environmental stakeholders, corporate environmental activities, and environmental management (systems).The results presented in this article are drawn from the latest completed round of the EBEB during which data was gathered in 1997/98. The questionnaire-based survey includes information on more than 2,800 companies from the producing sector with 50 or more employees in 11 European countries.¹     

晋升激励、地域偏爱与企业环境表现:来自A股上市公司的经验证据

晋升激励和地域偏爱是影响地方政府官员决策行为的关键因素。本文以2009-2015年沪深A股上市企业为样本，探讨官员更替对企业环境表现的影响，并分别从晋升激励和地域偏爱两个角度切入分析这种影响背后的机制。研究发现，地方政府换届后，若继任官员来自本地调任，则当地企业的环境表现将得到改善；而若继任官员来自异地调任，则当地企业的环境表现将发生恶化。这一研究结论在解决可能的内生性问题、改变度量指标、考虑滞后反应、进行安慰剂测试、调整样本及控制其他可能的遗漏变量等一系列稳健性测试后仍然成立。进一步研究发现，异地调任的继任官员出于晋升激励的动机而倾向于降低地方环境治理水平；而本地调任官员出于对曾经任职地区的地域偏爱而更重视当地环境治理。本文创新性地从地方官员的晋升激励和地域偏爱视角探讨企业的环境社会责任，为理解地方官员的决策模式和企业环境责任行为提供了新思路。     

What’s in a name? Decomposing corporate reputation to assess the relative impact of temporal, firm and industry level factors

While the perceptual nature of corporate reputation is rarely contested, the role of governance and firm financial performance does not have the same consensus. As reputation is an embedded capability that cannot be distinctly valued or traded, the ambiguity in reputation generation clouds researchers’ attempts to understand the relative importance of the underlying causal factors, particularly firm-specific attributes like board characteristics, governance and ownership—independent of the firm’s financial performance over time. Utilizing a resource—based view, we develop a theoretically grounded framework that enables us to deconstruct corporate reputation and parse out the impact at multiple levels and the factors therein. We decompose reputation into time, firm and industry level factors, offer hypotheses on the relative importance of the factors at each level, and thereafter we simultaneously assess within and across the temporal, firm and industry levels to quantify the impact of the causal factors. We find that 49.65 % of the variation in corporate reputation is firm-specific, independent of financial performance, while industry-specific variables account for just 5.04 %. The temporal factors including the multi-level interaction terms explain 46.06 % of reputational variation, of which financial performance accounts for only 18.53 % and the “halo effect” of prior financial performance is short-lived. Furthermore, the commonly accepted factors explain only 26.44 % of the total variation in corporate reputation, and some of the governance and ownership indicators contradict generally accepted agency expectations.     

Integrated Management Systems — Opportunities and Risks for Corporate Environmental Protection

Environmental protection in companies is increasingly carried out using Integrated Management Systems (IMS). Based on empirical results, this article examines how IMS can be designed and how the integration affects corporate environmental protection. In particular, we discuss the findings of four empirical studies, which surveyed experiences of German and European companies.Our work shows, that the success of corporate environmental protection does not depend on whether the company has implemented a separate environmental management system or an IMS. What is crucial is the rank of environmental protection within the company's system of objectives. In case of goal conflicts, decision criteria in agreement with the company's system of objectives have to be formulated. Furthermore, the IMS model can have an effect on this issue. The results of a pilot project in the automobile sector are discussed to illustrate how to implement such an IMS on the basis of ISO 14001.Compared to isolated environmental management systems, IMS can even improve environmental protection, because ecological criteria can be considered from the beginning when designing customer-oriented products and processes.     

Key survival issues: Practical steps toward corporate environmental sustainability

Environmental pressures and growing societal commitment to the ideal of “sustainable development” pose profound strategic challenges for business. Recognition of the significance of sustainable development for business and eagerness to “do something” has lead to a number of responses from companies. The most effective corporate response is to build an environmentally sustainable business. The Environment Council through its work had developed an elegantly simple and proven approach to producing and implementing a strategy for doing this.This approach involves recognising that corporate strategic environmental opportunities and threats fall into three inter-related categories; Resources, Innovation, and Values. Applying the simple technique of a Strenghts, Weaknesses. Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis of the business against these fields enables managers to establish the organisation's environmentally-driven key survival issues (KSIs) - environmental threats and opportunities to which the company has to develop the right response to ensure survival and prosperity. Every business has perhaps two or three key survival issues, though few seems to know what they are and even fewer are doing anything serious about them. The article gives some guidance on identifying key survival issues and how to develop a consistent corporate response.     

Corporate strategy at Admiram Manufacturing Company: An Iranian case study

In this article, corporate strategy is delineated for an Iranian firm, Admiram Manufacturing Company. Environmental and corporate resources are conceptualized upon which Admiram's corporate strategy formulation and implementation are based.     

Environmental information disclosure and stakeholder involvement: Searching for common ground

In a recent national summit hosted by The Vanderbuilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, high level corporate, environmental, and government officials came together to discuss the growing trend towards the disclosure of environmental information as a tool to increase public accountability. Both regulators and environmentalists showed interest in continuing to utilize and, in many cases expeand, existing environmental information disclosure programs. The summit was viewed as a catalyst in the ongoing national discussion of the efficacy of this evolving area of government policy. This article highlights some of the key results of this event and offers suggested next steps to address credibility and effectiveness in environmental information disclosure.