Environmental management and labor productivity: The moderating role of quality management

Abundant studies have been made around the impact of environmental management on economic performance in business, but there is still no consistent conclusion. This study focuses on labor productivity as a measure of economic performance. We argue that environmental management has a negative impact on the labor productivity of company in the special context of Chinese increasingly stringent environmental regulations, but this impact is moderated by quality management. Environmental management score and the years that companies have passed ISO 9001 are set as proxies for independent and moderating variable respectively. A sample including 229 Chinese listed companies is used to test the hypotheses by multiple regression analysis. Results show that environmental management has a negative impact on labor productivity, and quality management moderates the relationship.