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Environmental Motivations: The Pathway to Complete Environmental Management

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Abstract

The aim of this research is to ascertain whether a firm’s environmental motivations may help to predict how complete or incomplete its environmental management will be, understanding incomplete management to be that which neglects one or more of the three keys aspects of such management, namely, monitoring, action and results. We specifically posit that while motivations based on the search for legitimation lead to more incomplete styles of environmental management, competitive motivations entail a more complete management. The analyses conducted with a sample of 1,902 plants provide empirical evidence in favour of such reasoning. The contribution this research makes, therefore, is not restricted solely to showing the effect motivations have on the environmental performance of organisations, as it also introduces a new dimension of environmental management—the degree of completeness, which needs to be considered when understanding and evaluating this effect.

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Notes

  1. Along these lines, multinational corporations frequently adapt their policies, products and processes to meet the requirements of the most demanding destination (Magretta 1997; Rugman and Verbeke 1998).

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Spanish Government and FEDER funds through research project ECO2010-21078. Aid was also received from the research project SA083A12-1 financed by the Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Castilla y León (Regional Ministry of Education of Castile and Leon). Part of this article was written during a research visit by G. Lannelongue at the Kelley Business School (Indiana University), Bloomington, IN. The hospitality of the The Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Universidad de Salamanca, Campus Miguel de Unamuno, 37007, Salamanca, Spain

    Gustavo Lannelongue, Oscar Gonzalez-Benito & Javier Gonzalez-Benito

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  1. Gustavo Lannelongue
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  2. Oscar Gonzalez-Benito
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  3. Javier Gonzalez-Benito
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Correspondence to Gustavo Lannelongue.

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Lannelongue, G., Gonzalez-Benito, O. & Gonzalez-Benito, J. Environmental Motivations: The Pathway to Complete Environmental Management. J Bus Ethics 124, 135–147 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1854-4

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