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The number of standards for management systems (MSs) has increased recently. Among the most recognizable ones are ISO9001, ISO14001 and OHSAS18001. The need for integration has risen due to the development and adoption of more than one MS in the same business, in a process known as integrated management systems (IMS). Some authors have argued that the use of IMS contributes toward sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to present an instrument to assess the integration of different MSs and its effect on sustainable performance.

A review of IMS, maturity of IMS and sustainability was conducted to build the instrument used in this research. Domingues et al. (2016), Poltronieri et al. (2017), Bernardo et al. (2009) and ISO9001:2015 were used as references pertaining to IMS, whereas Global Reporting Initiative and the research of Delai and Takahashi (2011) were employed for performance issues. All were evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively.

In the pre-test the order of some questions was changed, some other questions were reformulated and a new classification was created. The evaluation of specialists contributed to reduce the number of questions and make the questionnaire more clear. Cronbach’s α was used to prove the reliability of the questionnaire.

The importance of this study lies in the development of an instrument that helps assess the maturity of the integration of MSs and evaluate sustainable performance.

This work aims to present existing management system standards (MSSs) published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) through a bibliometric analysis, thereby outlining their academic research status and highlighting their relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as to environmental, social and governance (ESG) themes.

The study firstly retrieves a preliminary set of MSSs standards from ISO and filters it in accordance with certain exclusion/inclusion criteria. Secondly, a bibliometric search is performed in the database Scopus. Thirdly, performance analysis is conducted to quantitatively measure the scientific output in academia, and science mapping of co-occurrences of keywords is applied to identify related topics. Thereby, the standards’ relationships to sustainability are outlined. Eventually, the work discusses future research opportunities.

The findings reveal that whereas research on MSSs focuses predominantly on only a few standards by now, there are actually numerous further standards that address sustainability-relevant topics, which are getting increasing attention among scholars as measured by the number of publications. Therefore, an action plan for future research is derived. Moreover, the findings support the argument of integrating MSSs to cover a broad range of corporate sustainability issues.

The paper connects the concepts of MSSs and sustainability, an upcoming research branch yet characterized by shortage of academic studies (given that research continues to focus on a few standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001). The work therefore opens up the line for more in-detail research on less known but nevertheless sustainability-relevant ISO MSSs.