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Measuring Environmental Strategy: Construct Development, Reliability, and Validity

CSS Publication Number
CSS11-21
Full Publication Date
March 2011
Abstract

Inconsistent results in prior work that link environmental strategy to competitive advantage may be due to the empirical difficulties of marrying the theoretical connection between a firm’s resource base and its environmental strategy. The authors contribute to the field by developing a measure that is congruent with the natural resource–based view, a dominant paradigm in this line of work. This article content analyses company reports and secondary data to develop a measure of environmental strategy grounded in the natural resource–based view. They identify six environmental capabilities that form components of a reliable, multidimensional construct of proactive environmental strategy. They also identify a measure of reactive compliance strategy. They verify reliability of their new measure through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, establish convergent and discriminant validity via a multitrait, multimethod matrix and demonstrate superior predictive validity of their measure compared to two others commonly used in the literature. In the conclusion, they discuss implications for research and practice.

Co-Author(s)
Pascual Berrone
Phillip H. Phan
Research Areas
Communities
Framework, Methods & Tools
Urban Systems and Built Environment
Keywords
competitive advantage, environmental capabilities, environmental strategy, measurement, reliability, validity
Publication Type
Journal Article
Digital Object Identifier
10.1177/0007650310394427
Full Citation
Walls, Judith L., Phillip H. Phan, Pascual Berrone. (2011) “Measuring Environmental Strategy: Construct Development, Reliability, and Validity” Business and Society, 50 (1): 71-115.