A Model of the Global and Institutional Antecedents of High-Level Corporate Environmental Performance

By Mark P. Sharfman, Teresa M. Shaft, Laszlo Tihanyi. 2004

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Stories of firms that exceed local compliance requirements in their environmental performance appear routinely. However, we have limited theoretical explanations of what propels these firms to exceed compliance. Our theory suggests that global competitive and institutional pressures lead multinational firms to develop highlevel, environmental management systems (EMS) that make them more competitive. For economic and other reasons, select firms make the choice to rationalize their collective environmental performance to the highest common denominator rather than the lowest. Regulations around the world differ widely and are a moving target in many settings. The need to comply with such myriad, shifting rules leads to firms creating EMS to help stay ahead of regulations worldwide. Using institutional and internationalization theories as our basis, we offer a propositional model concerning global competitive/institutional pressures and their effects on corporate environmental performance. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of the model.

Subfields: Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77d1f9d5aabae7cea795c7fc1c1dbd3ca95ea9bb

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Citations in the corpus

Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in South Africa (2008, result): “Consistent with Hoffman (1999) and Sharfman, Shaft, and Tihanyi (2004), our findings suggest that region-specific institutional pressures play a significant role in shaping CSR. Pressure to respect the preferences of region-specific stakeholders influences the operations of companies active in…”
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Asia (2005, background): “Therefore, in terms of Perlmutter’s (1969) classification, we therefore hypothesize that in terms of CSR, multinational companies will adopt a polycentric approach by adapting CSR approaches to national business systems and salient social issues, rather than the geocentric approach suggested by Shar”
Corporate Social Responsibility and Institutional Theory: New Perspectives on Private Governance (2012, background): “Most obvious are so-called codes of conduct/ethics/practice, sets of rules and norms by which responsible practices throughout the organization are governed (Sharfman et al., 2004).”
Corporate charitable giving, multinational companies and countries of concern (2009, unknown): “…giving Geographical diversification tends to increase the number and diversity of stakeholder pressures in the firm’s external environment that arise because of social, cultural, legal, regulatory, and economic variations between countries (Kostova and Zaheer, 1999; Sharfman et al., 2004).”