Hengky Latan

Barriers to the adoption of green operational practices at Brazilian companies: effects on green and operational performance

The objective of this paper is to verify to what degree the internal and external barriers (I/EBs) to environmental management affect the adoption of green operational practices (GOPs) and to determine whether they influence the firms’ operational and green performance in a sample of Brazilian companies. A conceptual framework with 8 hypotheses is proposed and tested at 75 companies using Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with WarpPLS 4.0. The main results show that (a) the proposed framework obtained an adequate statistical adjustment, (b) the internal barriers (IBs) are more significant than the EBs when adopting GOPs, (c) GOPs relate directly to the firms’ green and operational performance (OP), (d) the IBs also indirectly influence the firms’ green and OP and (e) the firm size does not significantly influence its green and OP. This work contributes to the literature by showing that companies which are looking for green competitive advantages should try to reduce their IBs. Also, policy-makers should pay attention not only to legislation that promotes ecological modernisation, but also to create a strong set of initiatives to overcome IBs, regardless of the size of the firms.

The importance of quality management for the effectiveness of environmental management: evidence from companies located in Brazil

Recent discussions in the specialised literature support that quality management influences the level and maturity of environmental management practices; however, in searches performed in the ISI Web of Science and Scopus databases, it was verified that there is a need for research to portray this relationship quantitatively, especially when it comes to companies located in Brazil. Thus, this research aims to explore this gap: does quality management positively influence the adoption of environmental practices in companies located in Brazil? Therefore, a conceptual grounding on the aforementioned issues was carried out and, based on this, the questionnaire used for the empirical phase of the research was constructed, being a self-administered e-survey with 104 companies of all sizes and sectors located in Brazil. The results demonstrated that, in fact, quality management positively influences environmental management practices. In addition, it was verified that the size of the companies and ISO 14001 certification are significant to control environmental management practices. To date, it is believed that this is the first study that shows a survey to test the relationship between quality management and environmental management practices in companies in Brazil.