Environmental practices. Motivations and their influence on the level of ...

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Jun 11, 2017 - In this respect, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) defines sustainable tour- ... Poksinska et al., 2003; Gavronski et al., 2008) and improvement of the environ- ... Valenciana, 2003), Manual of good environmental practices in professional fami- .... Saizarbitoria, I. H., Landín, G. A., & Azorín, J. F. M. (2008).
5th Interdisciplinary Tourism Research Conference: 349-355. 6 – 11 June 2017, Cartagena, Spain Printed in Turkey. All rights reserved ISBN: 978-605-65762-8-7

Environmental practices. Motivations and their influence on the level of implementation José Álvarez-García University of Extremadura, Spain E-mail: [email protected] María de la Cruz del Río-Rama University of Vigo, Spain E-mail: [email protected] Cristina Oliveira European University of the Canary Islands, Spain E-mail: [email protected]

INTRODUCTION Tourism is a strong and important activity all over the world if we consider its figures. The contribution of Travel and Tourism generated 7.2 trillion dollars, which represents 9.8% of the world's GDP (in Spain, 26.0% of GDP), growing for the fifth consecutive year, and 284 million jobs were funded by travel and tourism in 2015 (1 out of each 11). In Spain, it represents 16.2% of total employment, 2,901,500 jobs (WTTC, 2016). In this context, unlimited tourist development of all economic, social and environmental goods is not possible. A balance must be found in order to avoid the deterioration of the environment, thus achieving a balance between the level of demand of visiting tourists and the load capacity of the local community and of the resources themselves, which is called “Sustainable Tourism”. In this sense, Crosby (1996:59) states that “most of the negative impacts are derived from the overuse and saturation of spaces, so a critical point must be found in which the level of demand is balanced with the optimum capacity of absorption of visitors, that an area or resource can bear without being deteriorated”. In this respect, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) defines sustainable tourism as “tourism that completely take into account current and future economic, social and environmental impacts to meet the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities”. According to the World Tourism Organization Network (UNWTO, n.d), “sustainable tourism must make optimum use of environmental resources, respect the socio-cultural authenticity of host communities and

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ensure long-term viable economic activities that provide well-distributed socioeconomic benefits to all stakeholders, including stable employment opportunities and obtaining income and social services for host communities, and that contribute to poverty reduction”. The UNWTO already shows the dimensions of this concept: environmental, social and cultural sustainability, as well as economic sustainability (Fullana and Ayuso, 2002). In Spain the thermal sector begins to realize the negative impacts that its economic activity can generate on its surroundings, which together with tourists´ demands, that each time show a greater awareness about environmental issues, the pressure from ecological groups and from the public administration causes spas to carry out their activity taking into account sustainability and environmental management. For this purpose, they implement good environmental practices with the aim of minimizing the negative impact of their activity and opt for placing value on their thermal resources (mineral-medicinal waters) through sustainable tourism. Practices that implement following voluntary instruments of environmental management, such as Manuals of Good Practices or the implementation of Environmental Management Systems (EMS), being the most known, according to Saizarbitoria et al. (2008, p.49) the ISO 14001 standard or the EMAS Regulation (EcoManagement and Audit Scheme). Including environmental management within the overall strategy of the company will allow according to Conde et al. (2003, p.45) to comply with the current legislation so as to avoid administrative sanctions (Saizarbitoria et al., 2008), and to respond to consumers’ demands and other interest groups, as well as to meet the requirements of competition and the customers in relation to environmental protection. This is reflected in a cost-saving amount (Melnyk et al., 2002; Pan, 2003; Zutshi and Sohal, 2004), in an improved external image among its clients and internal image among its workers (Zeng et al.), improved productivity (Pan, 2003; Poksinska et al., 2003; Gavronski et al., 2008) and improvement of the environmental performance of organizations (Potoski and Prakash, 2005; Link and Naveh, 2006), among others. In this context, the objective is to identify and analyze good environmental practices followed by this sector in Spain, which will allow to measure the degree of commitment or involvement of thermal establishments with the environment. And on the other hand, to analyze if the motivations that lead thermal establishments to implement environmental practices influence their level of implementation. In order to present the work hypotheses, an extensive review of the academic literature published on ISO 14001 and EMAS was carried out. Most of the research deals with how the implementation of these quality systems affects the benefits and results obtained by companies, for example in improving competitiveness and business efficiency (Poksinska et al, 2003; Yiridoe et al., 2003; Gavronski et al., 2008). In this sense, some authors consider that the improvement of competitive-

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ness is favored by the improvement of internal efficiency (Montabon et al., 2000; Kollman and Prakash, 2002) and others, assimilate it to the reduction of the use of resources (Melnyk et al., 2002) or energy saving (Rondinelli and Vastag, 2000). Other investigations analyze the motivations that lead companies to implement these systems (Gavronski et al., 2008, Mariotti et al., 2014), the barriers to be overcome in the process (Boiral and Henri, 2012), the difficulties to comply with the requirements of the standard. The novelty of this study is to analyze if the motivations influence the level of implementation of the practices. In this sense, many studies corroborate that a greater motivation influences achieving greater benefits related in many cases to a higher level of implementation (Gavronski et al., 2008, Pan, 2003, Poksinska et al. 2003, Zirsh et al., 2003). On the other hand, if we take into account the existing literature, which mainly discusses two types of internal and external motivations (Bansal and Roth, 2000), that are not mutually exclusive and reinforce each other, several studies analyze which are the most important ones (Poksinska et al., 2003; Pan, 2003; Schylander and Martinuzzi, 2007). In this sense, De Durana (2014: 293) states, taking into account the studies carried out, that external factors have priority over internal factors for most companies. The findings and conclusions of the literature review allow us to propose and justify the following hypotheses: H1: Motivations influence the level of implementation of environmental practices in companies. H3: External motivations are more important than internal motivations. H2: External motivations lead companies to make greater efforts to implement environmental practices than internal motivations. METHODOLOGY The methodology used is the performance of a descriptive analysis and a regression analysis of the data obtained through a structured questionnaire, 83 items grouped into three main sections (internal environmental practices, practices related to their stakeholders and resource management), sent to the person responsible for quality of the establishments. The questionnaire was designed taking into account the manuals and guides of the Conselleria de Medi Ambient (Generalitat Valenciana, 2003), Manual of good environmental practices in professional families: Tourism and Hotel Industry (MTAS, n.d), Guide to good environmental practices. Tourism sector (hotels and golf courses). Biodiversity Foundation (Vargas Sánchez et al., 2003). The target population is the 112 active thermal establishments in 2015, obtaining a sample size of 62 valid surveys received, which means a response rate of 55.36% and a sampling error of 8.35% for a confidence level of 95% (z = 1.96 p = q = 0.5). The scale of measurement is a Likert type of 7 points (1 - totally disagree, 7 - totally agree).

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The data analysis is performed using SPSS 19.0 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) statistical program. First a descriptive analysis is performed and the measurement scales (reliability and validity) are validated. For the analysis of internal consistency, we used the calculation of the correlation coefficients of Pearson item-total (the correlation between the items should exceed 0.3 according to Nunnally, 1979) and Cronbach's alpha, where alpha must be greater than 0.7 (Nunnally, 1979) or 0.8 for confirmatory studies. Secondly, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with varimax rotation was carried out to identify the dimensionality of the scales motivations (Bagozi and Baumgartner, 1994). This process allowed to group the items of each of the concepts and to know their structure. Finally, for the purpose of comparing the working hypotheses, regression analysis was used. This analysis allows to analyze the relationship between a dependent variable and its independent or predictor variables. The sign of the correlation coefficient  allows to know the direction of the relationship and the statistical F, the goodness of fit of the regression and the p-value (> or