The Relationship among Environment Protection and other Manufacturing Capabilities in Chinese Manufacturing Industry

In recent years, environment protection has been taken into account in the analysis of manufacturing strategy. However, according to investigation in Chinese manufacturing industry, the overall level of environment protection of top 100 companies is still low as a whole. This study proposed and tested an extended sand cone model from environment protection perspective. The research used structural equation modeling and data from a sample of 212 Chinese manufacturers based on IMSS-V. The results show that environment protection has direct, positive, significant effects on the other four manufacturing capabilities. It is observed that the predominant strategic model in these firms is one of multiple, non-incompatible capabilities with cumulative effects. This means that Chinese manufacturing firms are able to achieve excellent results in other manufacturing objectives simultaneously when they take efforts to practice environment protection.