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Researchers, consultants, and business managers have long recognized the critical role of management, especially top management, in initiating, implementing, and supporting corporate and manufacturing initiatives. This recognition gained prominence in the production and inventory control field in the late 1970s with the emergence of manufacturing resources planning (MRP II) [29]. At that time several prominent writers (e.g., Lee and Steinberg, Orlicky, and Plossl and Wight [10, 15, 16]) noted that for MRP II to succeed, management at all levels, especially the top level, had to "buy in" to the new approach. That is, they had to publicly support the need for and use of the MRP II approach and had to be seen to be actively committed to it. They had to provide the needed access to critical corporate resources of time, money, and personnel for the MRP II implementation project. Finally, management was asked to monitor the implementation project by identifying specific milestones stated in terms of objectives and time, and by ensuring that progress to those milestones was maintained. Without management's support, no MRP II project could hope to succeed.
This awareness of the importance of management support is not limited to MRP II; it extends to other corporatewide developments such as TQM [91 and JIT [28]. Management support influences areas such as successful new-product development [25], successful management consulting projects [61, and project management [7]. In short, management support and involvement are critical to corporate success [5].
With environmental initiatives, realization of the importance of top management support is reemerging. The reasons are ISO 14000 and the growing awareness of the need for firms to be more environmentally responsible. Increasingly, firms are asked by customers, governments, investors, and other stakeholders (e.g., workers and local communities) to reduce pollution and improve overall corporate enviro=ental performance.
Interest in improving corporate environmental performance can be traced to the 1970s [1, 12, 21], but awareness of this concept was renewed in the early 1990s. Michael Porter [17] used the logic underlying JIT systems to justify the need for greater interest in improved environmental performance. He argued that because pollution could be viewed as a form of waste, any action directed at reducing pollution should ultimately help the firm reduce costs and improve corporate performance. This...