Résumé
During the last two decades, quality and environmental-related standards have proliferated worldwide. A quality standard (QS) ensures that the quality of goods and services provided by an organization meets customers’ demands and regulatory requirements. An environmental-related standard (ES) requires that an organization implements a set of environmental practices and procedures which ensure that risks, liabilities and impacts are properly identified, minimized and managed. These standards are voluntary and generic, i.e., can be adopted by all kinds of firms regardless of their size, activity and location. In a theoretical perspective, QS are likely to increase firms’ competitiveness by lowering defect rates, reducing cost of quality, and, increasing productivity, on-time delivery and customer satisfaction. Similarly, organizations implementing an ES are likely to gain competitive advantage. An ES may help a firm to detect and eliminate inefficiencies in resource use. Nevertheless, empirically, the issue of whether QS and ES have a positive or negative impact on business performance is far from resolved. Beyond the similar architecture of these organizational schemes, quality standards are privately oriented, whereas environmental-related ones are mainly publicly oriented.