Grau de maturidade da gestão e práticas ambientais: estudo das empresas do setor de componentes para calçados no RS, SC, e SP

Abstract

Corporate environmental management has become one of the main topics of business strategy, object of studies for the Academy and a necessity for businesses, especially for those who have high environmental impact. This branch of business administration develops in evolutionary stages in organizations, called degrees of maturity of environmental management, and are relevant to the investigation and understanding of the efforts made by business organisations in regard to the environment, assisting the direction and guidance of resources towards achieving environmental excellence. To adjust their operations and solve their difficulties in relation to the environment, organizations adopt environmental practices that may be related to the degree of maturity of environmental management. Analyzing the relevance of the topic, the research aimed to investigate the degree of maturity of management and environmental practices by evolutionary stages reactive, preventive and proactive components for footwear companies in RS, SC and SP. Applied research was carried out, with descriptive characteristics, using quantitative approach, accomplished through a survey with a data collection instrument developed for this purpose and applied to a sample of 269 industries of the group of companies selected, with 28 valid responses to the questionnaire sent. Data were analyzed by means of correlation analysis, using the software SPSS statistics 21, to verify the relationship between the evolution of environmental management and environmental practices. The degree of maturity has been verified from the score achieved in 1 to 5 scale, measured by the harmonic average of responses in each block of questions of the instrument, corresponding to the stages of maturity, according to the characteristics of the environmental management. The results obtained from the analysis indicate that the group obtained scores with the reactive stage with 3.76, proactive with 4.11 and preventive with 2.85 points, featuring the preventive stage companies with proactive trend and demonstrating the permanence of elements from previous evolutionary stages in subsequents one. The elationship between evolutionary stages and environmental practices adopted, was analyzed by statistical correlation coefficient and achieve significance of 0.699, indicating significant relationship between both. For future work, it is suggested to carry out research on companies in other sectors of industrial activity and expansion of the number of enterprises, as well as studies focused on environmental management and it's relationship with administrative areas.