Being 'Green and Competitive': The Impact of Environmental Actions and Collaborations on Firm Performance

In this paper, we seek to enhance the understanding of the link between environmental management and firm performance, so contributing to the debate of being "green and competitive". Relying on the resource-based view, we study the effect of different environmental management capabilities on a firm's market and image performance. In particular, we analyze the capabilities to implement product and process-related environmental actions with different types of environmental focus (materials, energy, pollution) and the capabilities to develop environmental collaborations with different types of actors (both business actors and non-business actors). To this aim we conducted a survey on 122 Italian companies. Results show that market performance and image performance have partially different antecedents. Specifically, a firm's market performance is positively affected by the capabilities to implement environmental actions with a focus on energy and pollution and to develop environmental collaborations both with business and with non-business actors. On the other hand, a firm's image performance is positively affected by the capabilities to implement environmental actions with a focus on materials and to develop environmental collaborations with non-business actors. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.