The Effects of Mandatory and Voluntary Regulatory Pressures on Firms’ Environmental Strategies: A Review and Recommendations for Future Research
Identificadores
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10481/90038Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemEditorial
Academy of Management
Materia
mandatory and voluntary environmental pressures regulation environmental strategy performance corporate responses
Fecha
2020-01Referencia bibliográfica
Academy of Management Annals, 14(1), 339-365.
Patrocinador
The first author is also grateful to the partial funding from the research grant ECO2016-75909-P (Spanish Ministry of Science and Education), and the feedback and inspiration from seminar participants at the Surrey Business School and the University of Granada-Innovation, Sustainability and Development (ISDE) Research Group. He also thanks David Allen for his support on the preliminary steps of this article.Resumen
This paper presents an in-depth review of scholarship on how mandatory and voluntary regulatory pressures on firms affect their environmental strategies and performance. While mandatory regulation typically has a strong and positive influence on firms’ environmental performance, studies of the effects of voluntary pressures demonstrate that by themselves they are unlikely to bring about significant improvement in environmental outcomes. Accordingly, future research should focus on the complementary impacts of mandatory and voluntary programs on organizations’ environmental strategies and performance rather than analyzing their separate influence. Scholars should examine i) more than a single environmental pressure at a given time, ii) more than one response to the regulatory context, iii) the synergy between mandatory and voluntary pressures, iv) the impact of imperfect enforcement, and v) the political influence corporations exert on the mandatory and voluntary pressures that affect them. This essay argues that managers react to environmental regulations in different ways depending on how they understand the multiple pressures that they confront and their opportunities to influence the outcomes.