In an era of increased stakeholder pressure for sustainable environmental management practices at workplace, organization should adopt and implement environmental ethics for seamless synergy amongst the needs of the business, the society, and the planet. Our study used resource-based view (RBV) and dynamic capabilities (DC) theoretical lenses to examine hypotheses derived from extant literature on the linkages amongst environmental ethics, environmental training, environmental performance and competitive advantage. Using survey questionnaire, we employed structural equation modeling (SEM) on 364 valid responses from managers to examine the hypotheses. The findings of our study will stir up researcher’s curiosity to unravel the human side of environmental management and that will surely steer future researches in significant directions. Results suggest that environmental ethics influences environmental training, environmental performance and competitive advantage. We also found that environmental training to employees mediates the influence of environmental ethics on firm’s environmental performance and competitive advantage. The findings of the study implies that organizational approach towards environmental ethical practices at workplace should be not be reactive but proactive with intentions to create and sustain synergy amongst the triads namely, profits, the society, and the environment. Environmental training should not be one-off event but a continuous process to beat competitions and improve environmental performance in the organization.

Introduction

The economic activities of firms always have other side to it – the ecological imbalance. Lately the firms have been witnessing greater stakeholders pressure to reduce the environmental impact created out of their business related activities (Longoni et al., 2018; Yu et al., 2017). As a result, firms are not only supposed to espouse environmental values to secure sustainable economic success (Tate and Bals, 2018) but they should view environmental management as measure of their ‘social performance’ (Short et al., 2016; Yawar and Seuring, 2017). That calls upon organizational leaders to be committed to environmental ethics through policy formulation and their implementation in day-today operations to reduce the environmental impact of business operations, if any (El-Kassar and Singh, 2018; Singh and El-Kassar, 2019). Several studies suggest that firm’s environmental performance depends upon their human resources’ sensitivity to environmental issues & possess specific green competencies related to core businesses for organizational usages in their value creation processes (El-Kassar and Singh, 2018; Guerci et al., 2016; Singh and El-Kassar, 2019). Therefore, we contemplate that the implementation of organizational intentions to ‘go green’ and manage environmental performance depends largely upon human resources across functions along with supportive HR systems & processes to effectively manage employee-related issues (Guerci et al., 2016; Nejati et al., 2017; Renwick et al., 2013). The extant literature also suggest for hiring candidates who demonstrate environmental knowledge and motivation (Jabbour et al., 2010) useful enough to enhance environmental performance as the later influences firm’s competitive advantage (Chuang and Huang, 2018; Famiyeh et al., 2018).