Management Commitment and Employee Empowerment in Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing Implementation

Management commitment and employee empowerment are most important and vital principles for the successful implementation of any newer manufacturing system or modern practice in any organization because the newer systems/practices require changed roles for people at all levels. The general human tendency to resist change understood properly may lead to dysfunctional implementation of newer systems/practices. Environmentally conscious manufacturing (ECM) being a new paradigm in manufacturing requires the changed roles for top management, middle management and employees. Therefore the managers must have measures to convince the shareholders that the plan to implement ECM has taken care of changed roles of people. This paper identifies the top management commitment, middle management commitment and employee empowerment measures for the successful implementation of ECM. The identified measures have been validated by a case study of Indian large scale enterprises. The measures identified from the literature have been validated by using SPSS for Windows statistical tool. The reliability and validity of the data has been assessed by the Cronbach alpha and factor analysis respectively. The results provide sure evidence that the identified measures are highly reliable and valid.