Environmental process design and performance: Understanding the key role of learning by doing and employee empowerment

Abstract

While learning by doing is considered a key to new knowledge creation, little is known if, by its inherent nature, environmental process design could benefit from this mode of knowledge creation. Furthermore, it is also necessary to understand how empowered employees can create more conducive designs for better environmental performance and how these phenomena are affected by their ability to freely experiment and learn through experience and experiments. Through a sample of 500 German and USA-based manufacturing firms, we establish that learning by doing positively affects both environmental process design and the environmental performance of firms. Employee empowerment was also found to moderate this relationship positively but to varying degrees. Our study has far-reaching implications for both academia and industry as it furthers the agenda of human resource management research that aims to find ways in which employees could enhance the environmental performance of firms.