فشار ذینفعان و اتخاذ شیوه های زیست محیطی: اثر واسطه آموزش

The influence of stakeholder pressure on the adoption of environmental practices has been established in the literature. In this paper we posit that these direct effects are further mediated, causally, by the level of training in companies. Theoretically, this relationship is supported by the relationship between institutional theory (stakeholder pressure) and the dimensions of dynamic capabilities in resource-based theory. We investigate this relationship within the Spanish automotive industry. The theoretical contribution of this paper focuses on further supporting the relationship between stakeholder and resource-based theory as complementary theoretical frameworks. The practical implications focus on whether or not training should be integrated in order to help in the adoption of particular environmental practices, which in this study are represented by environmentally oriented reverse logistics practices.

The promulgation of various political, social, and economic pressures regarding environmental issues over the past few decades has caused companies to take these issues into greater consideration in their strategic and operational outlooks. The competitiveness of organizations has gone beyond building quality products at low costs in a timely manner. Corporate responsibility and social issues are even more critical for organizational competitiveness at strategic and operational levels (Porter and Kramer, 2006). The natural environment is at the center of this broader ‘sustainability’ competitiveness argument for organizations and operations. Companies understand the importance of responding to pressure from stakeholders (Freeman, 1984) to help improve their competitive posture; however, they also need to manage the many perspectives and conflicting interests of their stakeholders, which requires them to develop specific capabilities to manage these pressures (Rueda-Manzanares et al., 2008). To respond to these pressures for adoption of environmental practices, the resource-based view of the firm posits that companies will build the necessary capabilities and capacities to be able to compete more effectively. Tactical capability is built by developing worker knowledge and skills through training. The importance of managing and balancing these external pressures with internal capabilities is not only important for organizations to manage but also provides insights for policy makers and partners within a broader supply chain perspective. An important function and resource in responding to these competitive pressures and building the necessary capability is training. Studying workforce (human resource) management and training is an important part of the operations and environmental management research agenda (Angell and Klassen, 1999, Daily and Huang, 2001, Hanna et al., 2000, Kitazawa and Sarkis, 2000 and Sarkis, 2001) and still continues to be a major, yet understudied topic (del Brio et al., 2007 and Jabbour et al., 2008). Much of the existing research in environmental operations management has concentrated on mid-level (firm/supply chain) issues and questions. However, much less attention has been given to workforce issues and environmental tools. Operations management researchers have been motivated to seek and understand the impact of environmental pressures, issue awareness and individual environmental values on the workforce. A related issue to this revived operational focus on environmental pressures is workforce training requirements for environmental tools such as design for environment, life-cycle analysis, recycling and other environmentally proactive practices (Angell and Klassen, 1999). Similar to the quality revolution of the 1980s, the green revolution in business at the end of the last century and beginning of this century requires that environmental management become a pervasive organizational philosophy where all individuals are involved in greening the company. This pervading empowerment of all employees to think and make decisions, and not just within the purview of specialized staff, was the goal of ISO 9000 and is now a primary goal of ISO 14000 and total quality environmental management efforts (Sarkis, 1998). Developing the necessary organizational knowledge to adopt and implement environmental initiatives requires developing knowledge capabilities throughout the organization, especially if the responsibilities for environmental management activities are assigned to these ‘empowered’ employees. Thus, the need and importance of training programs within organizations is clear. Nevertheless, few studies have investigated the role of environmental training within the adoption of various environmental operating practices. This study will examine this specific issue. The aim of this paper is to provide further insight into the role of training in the adoption of environmental, organizational and operational practices, especially in response to stakeholder pressure. We analyze whether the adoption of environmental practices motivated by stakeholder pressures is mediated by environmental training efforts aimed at employees within the organization. Mediation allows us to evaluate whether there is a causal relationship between the stakeholders pressures, the environmental practices and the training. The results of our study overwhelmingly show that, for the Spanish automotive industry, training completely mediates the relationship between pressure from stakeholders and the adoption of three major groups of environmental practices. There are clear managerial implications concerning the fostering and management of such programs and projects. Furthermore, there exists broad policy issues associated with these results. These implications will be discussed in later sections. In the following section we provide the practical and theoretical bases for our study. Our discussion starts with the various relationships existing between stakeholder theory and the adoption and performance of environmental management practices. We likewise briefly introduce the role of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm in these relationships. We also discuss the general role of training in this situation, a discussion which aids in clarifying the fundamental hypotheses of our study. Our methodology and sample characteristics are then defined. Finally, we present our results with a discussion of their implications. Research limitations and future research directions appear in the final section.

The results of this study indicate that training, specifically environmental training, mediates the relationship between stakeholder pressures and various environmental practices. Complete mediation occurred regardless of the type of environmental practice adopted. These results show that automotive companies are only adopting environmental practices if training programs are in effect. Thus, development of the necessary intangible knowledge capacities is required in order to achieve effective response to pressures. Without instituted training programs, these pressures may go unheeded. The strongest relationship with training as a mediator seemed most evident with regards to eco-design practices. Of all the environmental practices, this one may be deemed the most technical, which may explain the need for training in order to successfully convince internal users of these methods of the importance of integrating eco-design practices into their activities. Training may need to serve a dual purpose in this situation, requiring a focus on both competency and motivation. Technical personnel typically have need of both dimensions for eco-design innovation (Johansson, 2002). These two dimensions in training also further the likelihood of adoption of these practices by human resources due to the building of their capacities (Boks, 2006). We did not tease out or fully evaluate what actually occurred in these training programs (awareness raising, motivational or technical competence development). Overall, there is additional room for research on the type of training and its effectiveness as a mediator, especially with respect to eco-design. The other factor here is that stakeholder pressures are a composite group of various pressures from a variety of sources. For example, some pressures on source reduction may come from internal stakeholders and may differ from external stakeholder pressures. For these practices, internal training is needed to build awareness of programs to help in these reduction efforts. For EMS implementation, training may be a requisite of external parties (e.g. the standards themselves) and may be more firmly related (especially since we are focusing on smaller automotive suppliers) to external stakeholder pressures to implement EMS as members of the supply chain. Thus, additional interesting insights can be accrued from the further identification and refinement of the type of stakeholder pressures that exist. Stakeholders may be viewed as not only internal or external, but also as primary and secondary. For example, the media may play a role as a secondary stakeholder, but may not singly produce the necessary pressures for companies to invest in training programs that would help in the implementation of environmental practices.