Michael W. Toffel Articles — HBS Working Knowledge

Operational Failures and Problem Solving: An Empirical Study of Incident Reporting

Authors:	Julia Adler-Milstein, Sara J. Singer, and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	September 23, 2009
Paper Release Date:	August 2009
Feature:	Working Papers

Operational failures occur within organizations across all industries, with consequences ranging from minor inconveniences to major catastrophes. How can managers encourage frontline workers to solve problems in response to operational failures? In the health-care industry, the setting for this study, operational failures occur often, and some are reported to voluntary incident reporting systems that are meant to help organizations learn from experience. Using data on nearly 7,500 reported incidents from a single hospital, the researchers found that problem-solving in response to operational failures is influenced by both the risk posed by the incident and the extent to which management demonstrates a commitment to problem-solving. Findings can be used by organizations to increase the contribution of incident reporting systems to operational performance improvement.

Quality Management and Job Quality: How the ISO 9001 Standard for Quality Management Systems Affects Employees and Employers

Authors:	David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	December 11, 2008
Paper Release Date:	August 2008, revised July 2009
Feature:	Working Papers

Nearly 900,000 organizations in 170 countries have adopted the ISO 9001 Quality Management System standard. This is a remarkable figure given the lack of rigorous evidence regarding how the standard actually affects organizational practices and performance. Proponents claim that quality programs such as ISO 9001 improve both management practices and production processes, and that these improvements, in turn, will increase both sales and employment. Documenting and training proper work practices can also reduce potentially dangerous "work arounds," and thus could reduce the risk of workplace accidents and injuries. Some critics, on the other hand, point to the potential for quality programs such as ISO 9001 to be detrimental to employees by documenting work practices, resulting in routinization that may reduce skill requirements and increase repetitive motion injuries. This paper reports the first large-scale evaluation of how ISO 9001 affects workers, focusing in particular on employment, total payroll, average annual earnings, and workplace health and safety.

Extending Producer Responsibility: An Evaluation Framework for Product Take-Back Policies

Authors:	Michael W. Toffel, Antoinette Stein, and Katharine L. Lee
Published:	November 6, 2008
Paper Release Date:	September 2008
Feature:	Working Papers

Managing products at the end of life (EOL) is of growing concern for durable goods manufacturers. While some manufacturers engage in voluntary "take back" of EOL products for a variety of competitive reasons, the past 10 years have seen the rapid proliferation of government regulations and policies requiring manufacturers to collect and recycle their products, or pay others to do so on their behalf. Toffel, Stein, and Lee develop a framework for evaluating the extent to which these product take-back regulations offer the potential to reduce the environmental impacts of these products in an effective and cost-efficient manner, while also providing adequate occupational health and safety protection. The evaluation framework is illustrated with examples drawn from take-back regulations in Europe, Japan, and the United States.

Responding to Public and Private Politics: Corporate Disclosure of Climate Change Strategies

Authors:	Erin M. Reid and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	October 1, 2008
Paper Release Date:	August 2008, revised April 2009
Feature:	Working Papers

Social activists are increasingly attempting to directly influence corporation behavior, using tactics such as shareholder resolutions and product boycotts to encourage companies to improve their environmental performance, increase their transparency about operations and governance, and more stringently monitor their suppliers' labor practices. This paper examines how companies are responding to these pressures, in the context of requests for greater transparency about the risks climate change poses to their business—and the strategies these companies have developed to address these risks. This paper reveals that a company is more likely to comply with social activists' requests for greater transparency about climate change when the company itself, or others companies in its industry, has been targeted by formal shareholder resolutions on environmental topics—and when the company is facing potential regulations restricting greenhouse gas emissions. These findings demonstrate that changes in corporate practices may be sparked by both social activists and by the mere threat of government regulations, and that challenges mounted against a specific firm may inspire broader changes within its industry.

Evaluating the Impact of SA 8000 Certification

Authors:	Michael J. Hiscox, Claire Schwartz, and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	June 18, 2008
Paper Release Date:	May 2008
Feature:	Working Papers

The Social Accountability 8000 Standard (SA 8000), along with other types of certification standards and corporate codes of conduct, represents a new form of voluntary "private-governance" of working conditions in the private sector, initiated and implemented by companies, labor unions, and nongovernmental activist groups cooperating together. There is an ongoing debate about whether this type of governance represents real and substantial progress or mere symbolism. This paper reviews prior evaluations of private codes of conduct governing workplace conditions, including Ethical Trading Initiative's Base Code, Nike's Code of Conduct, and Fair Trade certification. The authors then discuss several best practices that should be employed in future evaluations of such codes of conduct.

Coming Clean and Cleaning Up: Is Voluntary Disclosure a Signal of Effective Self-Policing?

Authors:	Michael W. Toffel and Jodi L. Short
Published:	June 4, 2008
Paper Release Date:	May 2008 (revised July 2009)
Feature:	Working Papers

This paper demonstrates some of the benefits and limitations of industry self-policing programs. Many self-regulation programs are operated exclusively by the private sector, often in the hope of garnering goodwill with consumers or staving off more stringent government regulation. Less well known are voluntary self-regulation programs operated by government regulators seeking innovative approaches to further regulatory objectives and to stretch shrinking agency budgets. Little is known about the effects of these programs, or how they might contribute to the overall effectiveness of a regulatory regime. Michael Toffel and Jodi Short seek to determine whether the self-policing required under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Audit Policy affects the behavior of regulators and participating facilities and the relationship between them. Specifically, the researchers examine whether self-policing is associated with improved environmental performance at these facilities and whether regulators reduce their scrutiny over self-policing facilities.

Diffusing Management Practices within the Firm: The Role of Information Provision

Authors:	Michael J. Lenox and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	April 17, 2008
Paper Release Date:	March 2008
Feature:	Working Papers

Managers face a range of options to diffuse innovative practices within their organizations. This paper focuses on one such technique: providing practice-specific information through mechanisms such as internal seminars, demonstrations, knowledge management systems, and promotional brochures. In contrast to corporate mandates, this "information provision" approach empowers facility managers to decide which practices to actually implement. The authors examine how corporate managers diffused advanced environmental management practices within technology manufacturing firms in the United States. The study identifies several factors that encourage corporate managers to employ information provision, including subsidiaries' related expertise, the extent to which the subsidiaries were diversified or concentrated in similar businesses, and the geographic dispersion of their employees.

Mapping Polluters, Encouraging Protectors

Published:	January 14, 2008
Feature:	Research & Ideas

Where are the biggest polluters? And what is your company doing to protect the environment? A new Web site—both a public service and a research tool—posts managers' data in real time, allowing a balanced view of industrial environmental performance. HBS professor Michael W. Toffel and senior research fellow Andrew A. King explain.

How Firms Respond to Being Rated

Authors:	Aaron K. Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	October 11, 2007
Paper Release Date:	October 2007, revised April 2009
Feature:	Working Papers

(Previously titled "Shamed and Able: How Firms Respond to Information Disclosure.") As national governments lose the ability to regulate business activities, interest groups and concerned citizens are turning to private governance to monitor global supply chains, ensure product safety, and provide incentives for improved corporate environmental performance. Proponents hope that private governance incentives will encourage firms to act responsibly, but critics worry that these developments will merely forestall necessary government regulation. Social ratings provide one way to benchmark and compare firms' social performance. But are such ratings schemes effective? This paper investigates the effects of third-party environmental ratings, and finds that firms are particularly likely to respond to such ratings by improving their environmental performance when two circumstances arise simultaneously: (1) when the ratings threaten their legitimacy, and (2) when they face relatively low cost improvement opportunities.

The Causes and Consequences of Industry Self-Policing

Authors:	Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	October 3, 2007
Paper Release Date:	September 2007
Feature:	Working Papers

The corporate confession is a paradox, as described in this paper aimed at managers, policymakers, and citizens. Why would a firm that identifies regulatory compliance violations within its own operations turn itself in to regulators, rather than quietly fix the problem? Economic intuition suggests that firms will self-disclose violations only when the cost of doing so is less than the expected cost of hiding violations. However, while the cost of doing so can be increased regulatory scrutiny, there is often almost no expected cost of hiding violations. To explore the complex behavior of corporate self-disclosure, Short and Toffel conducted a large-scale analysis in the context of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Audit Policy. They investigated what factors lead organizations to self-disclose violations that went undiscovered by regulators, and asked whether these self-disclosing organizations were obtaining any unofficial regulatory benefits above and beyond formal penalty mitigation. They also evaluated whether self-policing promotes the regulatory objective of improving compliance records.

Self-Regulatory Institutions for Solving Environmental Problems: Perspectives and Contributions from the Management Literature

Authors:	Andrew King and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	May 25, 2007
Paper Release Date:	May 2007
Feature:	Working Papers

What role can business managers play in protecting the natural environment? Academic research on when it might "pay to be green" has advanced understanding of how and when firms achieve sustained competitive advantage. The focus of such research, however, has begun to change in light of limits to available "win-win" opportunities and to gaps in regulation. This paper, intended as a book chapter, reviews current literature and explores the potential of self-regulatory institutions to solve environmental problems.

Industry Self-Regulation: What's Working (and What's Not)?

Q&A with:	Michael W. Toffel
Published:	April 9, 2007
Feature:	Research & Ideas

Self-regulation has been all over the news, but are firms that adopt such programs already better on important measures like labor and quality practices? Does adopting a program help companies improve faster? In this Q&A, HBS professor Michael Toffel gives a reality check and discusses the trends for managers.

Do Corporate Social Responsibility Ratings Predict Corporate Social Performance?

Authors:	Aaron K. Chatterji, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	February 9, 2007
Paper Release Date:	February 2007
Feature:	Working Papers

Ratings of corporations' environmental activities and capabilities influence billions of dollars of "socially responsible" investments as well as consumers, activists, and potential employees. But how well do these ratings predict socially responsible outcomes such as superior environmental performance? Companies can enhance their environmental image in one of two ways: by reducing or minimizing their impact on the environment, or by merely appearing to do so via marketing efforts or "greenwashing." This study evaluates the predictive validity of environmental ratings produced by Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research & Analytics (KLD), and tests whether companies that score high on KLD ratings generate superior environmental performance or whether highly rated firms are simply superior marketers of the factors that these rating agencies purport to measure. The data analysis examines all 588 large, publicly-owned companies in the United States that were both regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and whose social performance was rated by KLD at least once during 1991-2003. This paper may be the first to examine the predictive validity of social or environmental ratings.

Resolving Information Asymmetries in Markets: The Role of Certified Management Programs

Author:	Michael W. Toffel
Published:	November 3, 2006
Paper Release Date:	October 2006
Feature:	Working Papers

Hundreds of thousands of firms rely on voluntary management programs to signal superior management practices to interested buyers, regulators, and local communities. Such programs typically address difficult-to-observe management attributes such as quality practices, environmental management, and human rights issues. The absence of performance standards and, in most cases, verification requirements has led critics to dismiss voluntary management programs as marketing gimmicks or "greenwash." Toffel examines whether a voluntary environmental management program with a robust verification mechanism attracts participants with superior environmental performance, and whether the program elicits improved environmental performance. His study focuses on the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System Standard, but the results have implications for voluntary management programs that govern many other difficult-to-observe management issues.

Organizational Response to Environmental Demands: Opening the Black Box

Authors:	Magali A. Delmas and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	November 3, 2006
Paper Release Date:	October 2006, revised June 2007
Feature:	Working Papers

How and why do organizations respond differently to pressures from different stakeholders? This question is central to organizational theory and feeds into strategic management research as well. Delmas and Toffel develop and test a model that describes why organizations respond differently to similar stakeholder pressures. They suggest that differences in how organizations distribute power across their internal corporate departments lead their facilities to prioritize different institutional pressures and thus adopt different management practices.

Coerced Confessions: Self-Policing in the Shadow of the Regulator

Authors:	Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Published:	October 13, 2006
Paper Release Date:	September 2006
Feature:	Working Papers

Are regulators necessary? In industry, self-regulation and self-policing have been touted as a new paradigm of regulation that trades outmoded "command-and-control" strategies for industry-directed, market-based solutions. Short and Toffel's work, one of the first empirical studies to address self-policing behavior, examined a rich data set of companies' voluntary disclosures of regulatory violations under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Audit Policy. The goal: to learn how violators behave when offered the option of voluntarily self-disclosing. The results show that even as corporations are given an expanding role in their own governance, the success of "voluntary" self-policing depends on the continued involvement of regulators with coercive powers.

Michael W. Toffel

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