A multicriteria method for environmental management system selection: an intellectual capital approach

•A multicriteria method for evaluating environmental management systems is proposed.•Financial and non-financial value creation criteria are integrated for decision-making.•The model is applied in firms with a proactive environmental management orientation.•Great importance is attributed to non-financial criteria when assessing these systems.•The proposed method is a formalization of the evaluation process that companies already employ.

The adoption of environmental management systems has become more widespread among those firms looking to minimize their environmental impacts. Considering that firms have to select the optimal management system from a set of possible alternatives, this paper presents a novel decision-making approach based on the multicriteria method of analytic network process, in order to evaluate and prioritize the implementation of environmental management system alternatives in for-profit firms. Since several relevant intangible benefits are derived from the adoption of this kind of management system (such as enhancing employees' knowledge and skills, as well as improving corporate reputation), the method integrates and quantifies both financial and non-financial (intellectual capital) value creation criteria in order to identify the alternative that maximizes a firm's total market value. The proposed approach is empirically tested in a group of Spanish olive oil firms with a proactive environmental management orientation, and the results confirm the reliability of the proposed model. Furthermore, the empirical applications reveal that all the olive oil firms attribute great importance to the intangible elements when assessing environmental management systems. These results suggest that it is appropriate to take into account the intellectual capital value resulting from these kinds of management systems, during the decision-making process. The proposed method formalizes the evaluation process that firms already employ; these firms certainly take non-financial capital value creation elements into account, albeit in an intuitive way.