Catherine A. Ramus

The Roles of Supervisory Support Behaviors and Environmental Policy in Employee “Ecoinitiatives” at Leading-Edge European Companies.

We assessed the relationships of environmental policy and supervisory support behaviors to employee environmental initiatives in leading-edge companies. We developed a behaviorally anchored rating ...

When are corporate environmental policies a form of greenwashing

Do environmental policy statements accurately represent corporate commitment to environmental sustainability? Because companies are not required by law to publish environmental policy statements or to verify that these statements are true using independent third parties, external stakeholders often wonder when a published commitment to a policy translates into actual policy implementation. The authors analyzed two independent databases to predict the circumstances under which large, leading-edge corporations in industry sectors will commit to and/or implement proactive corporate environmental policies and when it is unlikely they will do so. The authors found that commitment to specific environmental policies does not vary greatly between industry sectors; however, policy implementation does.

Encouraging innovative environmental actions: what companies and managers must do

Increasingly environmentally proactive firms are interested in finding ways to encourage employees to take environmental actions that will improve the environmental performance of company operations, products and services. Results of an employee survey show that both environmental policies and supportive supervisory behaviors can increase the probability that employees will try environmental initiatives. We describe environmental policies and supervisory behaviors that exist in firms that are committed to sustainable development and employee environmental initiatives. From the survey results, we draw some lessons for managers and organizations that would like to support employee participation in sustainable development activities.

Corporate Social Responsibility Reputation Effects on MBA Job Choice

In a preliminary study with 279 MBAs from two European and three North American business schools we find that reputation-related attributes of caring about employees, environmental sustainability, community/ stakeholder relations, and ethical products and services are important in job choice decisions. We use an adaptive conjoint analysis survey tool to discover the relative weighting of a new set of social responsibility job search criteria, including these attributes with traditional job search criteria like financial package, geographical location, etc. In addition, our results show that more than ninety percent of the MBAs in the sample were willing to forgo financial benefits in order to work for an organization with a better reputation for corporate social responsibility and ethics.

Stakeholders As Coaches: An Experiential Method For Teaching Environmental Regulatory Negotiation

The author presents a teaching method that uses stakeholders as coaches of management students and professionals who wish to learn about the regulatory negotiation process used to make federal environmental rules. This experiential approach, which includes stakeholder briefings of teams who then role-play a regulatory negotiation, is an engaging way for participants to learn how to manage complex situations and negotiate with multiple parties. It has the additional benefit of helping stakeholders step back from the table to gain new perspectives about the content and process of the environmental negotiation in which they have been involved.

Including Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Sustainaibility, and Ethics in Calibrating MBA Job Preferences

Our research studies 759 MBAs graduating from eleven business schools to gain insight into what MBAs in the 21st Century care about during their job searches. We update the MBA job preference literature by using adaptive conjoint analysis to calibrate the relative importance of a wide variety of job factors combining factors found in previous research in disparate fields (general management, applied psychology, corporate social performance, ethics, and marketing). Our results show the relative importance of organizational reputation related to caring for employees, ethical products and practices, and social and environmental responsibility, compared to factors like financial package, job challenge, etc. to 759 MBAs graduating from eleven business schools--eight in North America and three in Europe. Study limitations and some mitigations of these are discussed.

Examining barriers to negotiated environmental agreements

We bring together disparate negotiation theory research in order to identify a composite set of potential barriers to reaching agreement in environmental negotiations. This framework builds on behavioral decision theory, showing barriers that arise from personal values and institutional values and norms, as well as from situational elements that influence individual behaviors and organizational strategies. We contribute to the literature on organizational behavior by making explicit the relationship between the strength of the situation and organizational behavior related to negotiations. The elements of situational strength have not been addressed adequately in prior negotiation literature. We incorporate this concept into a comprehensive set of barriers to offer explanations for the intractability of many environmental disputes.