Adoption and maintenance of environmental management systems: Critical success factors

The implementation of various management systems and standards has become an important activity for organisations irrespective of their size, sector or nature of the business. Even with a history of implementing change across the organisation, managers continue to experience resistance and challenges when implementing and maintaining the systems/standards, whether they be in quality, occupational health and safety, environmental or any other area. Based on a major research project recently completed, this paper presents the critical success factors for successful implementation of an environmental management system. The project involved three phases of fieldwork: preliminary interviews, a questionnaire survey and in‐depth interviews. A brief summary of the findings from each of these phases of research is presented. Based on the findings, the paper discusses the critical success factors for the successful implementation and maintenance of EMS.