Corporate Environmental Initiatives in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises and Their Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study

The impact from corporate business activities on the natural environment and society at large has been in focus for quite some time. The focus has often been on corporate environmental sustainability initiatives reflecting industry's response to concerns expressed by key stakeholders as well as the potential influence on the bottom line and the competitive situation. Much less investigated is the extent to which management itself perceives that corporate environmental initiatives actually lead to positive results. This is the very focus of this research, which is based on data collected by identical surveys of industrial companies in Denmark over a number of years. The results indicate a slightly increasing involvement over time, but also that the level of results achieved is lower than the level of initiatives taken. That is, the reactive attitude reported previously still seems to be prevailing. The results also seem to indicate that the size of the company may have a negative influence in some situations, since smaller companies seems to be better at achieving results compared with medium sized companies. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment