Environmental training and environmental management maturity of Brazilian companies with ISO14001: empirical evidence

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Processo FAPESP: 2011/23454-1

In the search for more environmentally sustainable organisations, scholars devoted to the subject of environmental management in industrial organisations are increasingly interested in identifying the human, organisational or technical factors that may be related to the environmental management maturity of those companies. In this context, based on the emerging literature on natural resource-based view of the firm and on green human resource management, one can question whether environmental training is, in fact, related positively and significantly with the maturity of the environmental management of companies with IS014001 located in Brazil. To address this question, a quantitative, exploratory, survey-based study, in which the collected data were subsequently processed using structural equation modelling, was performed using data from 95 companies. The results indicate the following: confirmation of the research hypothesis H1, i.e., that the construct environmental training (ET) relates positively and significantly with the environmental management maturity (EMM) of the companies in the sample, and the power of determination of ET over EMM can be considered "large". (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.