Journal:Quality and environmental management systems as business tools to enhance ESG performance: A cross-regional empirical study
| Full article title | Quality and environmental management systems as business tools to enhance ESG performance: A cross-regional empirical study |
|---|---|
| Journal | Environment, Development and Sustainability |
| Author(s) | Ronalter, Louis M.; Bernardo, Merce; Romaní, Javier M. |
| Author affiliation(s) | Universitat de Barcelona |
| Primary contact | Email: ronalterlouis at gmail com |
| Year published | 2022 |
| Article # | 660 |
| DOI | 10.1007/s10668-022-02425-0 |
| ISSN | 1573-2975 |
| Distribution license | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International |
| Website | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10668-022-02425-0 |
| Download | https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10668-022-02425-0.pdf (PDF) |
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Abstract
The growing societal and political focus on sustainability at the global level is pressuring companies to enhance their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance to satisfy respective stakeholder needs and ensure sustained business success. With a data sample of 4,292 companies from Europe, East Asia, and North America, this work aims to prove through a cross-regional empirical study that quality management systems (QMSs) and environmental management systems (EMSs) represent powerful business tools to achieve this enhanced ESG performance. Descriptive and cluster analyses reveal that firms with QMSs and/or EMSs accomplish statistically significant higher ESG scores than companies without such management systems. Furthermore, the results indicate that operating both types of management systems simultaneously increases performance in the environmental and social pillar even further, while the governance dimension appears to be affected mainly by the adoption of EMSs alone.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, such large-scale, cross-regional analysis of the impact of QMSs and EMSs on ESG performance is absent from the literature, thus paving the way for pioneering academic research. The study is grounded in stakeholder theory and demonstrates to managers how the implementation of management systems can assist in successfully translating stakeholders’ sustainability concerns into actionable business practice. Furthermore, it allows decision-makers to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of QMSs and EMSs for tackling specific ESG issues and highlights the performance advantages of combining both management systems. The work also depicts to policymakers how corporate sustainable performance (CSP) can be improved by fostering management systems adoption, thereby emphasizing the importance of supporting and facilitating the diffusion of these systems.
Keywords: corporate sustainable performance, environmental management systems, ESG performance, quality management systems, sustainability
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This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation, spelling, and grammar. We also added PMCID and DOI when they were missing from the original reference.
