Environmental managers and departments as driving forces of TQEM in Spanish industrial companies

The integration of environmental responsibility in the organisational structure of companies means granting an increasing relevance to this area. They have a manager in charge of the area or a department dedicated exclusively to it, which should redound to the achievement of increasingly higher effectiveness of the environmental programs. The objective of this paper is to judge the level of development of environmental management systems and their relation to the importance companies attach to the environmental area in their organisational chart. We show that as companies advance in their environmental behaviour they attach more importance to this area in their organisational structure.