Searching for sustainable growth opportunities, manufacturing firms are increasingly embedding

ustainabilityconcerns into their relationships with supply chain partners. In the present paper, we
explore the potential of environmental collaboration with suppliers and customers to induce
environmentally sustainable improvements to internal processes to address external sustainability
pressures and to contribute to business performance. Grounded in resource based view spin-offs, this
study claims that environmental collaboration can enhance the performance of the focal firm not only
directly, but also indirectly - by stimulating the focal firm to implement more environmentally
sustainable processes that in turn contribute to firm's performance. Providing manufacturing
managers with a better understanding of the direct and indirect relationships between environmental
collaboration and firm performance can gain them more control over the outcomes of environmental
collaboration. Proposed relationships were tested in a sample of 139 Dutch food and beverage
processors using structural equation modelling. The results indicate that environmental collaboration
with suppliers can improve the performance of Dutch food and beverage processors directly as it
induces cost savings. Nevertheless, such collaboration is not likely to assist firms seeking to improve
environmental sustainability of their internal processes as one of the outcomes of environmental
collaboration. On the contrary, environmental collaboration with customers induces performance
indirectly, by stimulating food and beverage processors to implement sustainable process
improvements that subsequently bring about cost savings and market gains.

Mencari peluang pertumbuhan yang berkelanjutan, perusahaan manufaktur semakin menanamkan

keberlanjutan ke dalam hubungan mereka dengan mitra rantai pasokan. Dalam makalah ini, kami
mengeksplorasi potensi kolaborasi lingkungan dengan pemasok dan pelanggan untuk mendorong
perbaikan lingkungan yang berkelanjutan untuk proses internal untuk mengatasi tekanan
keberlanjutan eksternal dan berkontribusi terhadap kinerja bisnis. Beralasan dalam pandangan
berbasis sumber daya, penelitian ini mengklaim bahwa kolaborasi lingkungan dapat meningkatkan
kinerja perusahaan fokus tidak hanya secara langsung, tetapi juga secara tidak langsung - dengan
menstimulasi perusahaan fokus untuk menerapkan proses yang lebih berkelanjutan secara lingkungan
yang pada gilirannya berkontribusi terhadap kinerja perusahaan. Menyediakan manajer manufaktur
dengan pemahaman yang lebih baik tentang hubungan langsung dan tidak langsung antara kolaborasi
lingkungan dan kinerja perusahaan dapat memberi mereka kontrol lebih besar atas hasil kolaborasi
lingkungan. Hubungan yang diusulkan diuji dalam sampel 139 prosesor makanan dan minuman
Belanda menggunakan pemodelan persamaan struktural.

Hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa kolaborasi lingkungan dengan pemasok dapat meningkatkan kinerja
prosesor makanan dan minuman Belanda secara langsung karena dapat menghemat biaya. Namun
demikian, kolaborasi semacam itu tidak mungkin membantu perusahaan yang ingin meningkatkan
keberlanjutan lingkungan dari proses internal mereka sebagai salah satu hasil dari kolaborasi
lingkungan. Sebaliknya, kolaborasi lingkungan dengan pelanggan menginduksi kinerja secara tidak
langsung, dengan merangsang prosesor makanan dan minuman untuk menerapkan perbaikan proses
berkelanjutan yang kemudian menghasilkan penghematan biaya dan keuntungan pasar.

Diskusi dan konklusi

tanding of the relationships between environmental collaboration and firm performance. When
committing resources and capabilities to environmental collaboration with suppliers and customers,
managers wish to know if they would be able to appropriate value created in these relationships and
in what ways this value can be appropriated. Especially the last issue was largely unexplored in
environmental collaboration research. Our findings in the context of Dutch F&B processors show that
environmental collaboration with suppliers is not likely to assist firms seeking to improve
environmental sustainability of their internal processes as one of the outcomes of environmental
collaboration. Environmental collaboration with suppliers only provides cost savings that do not result
from internal process improvements. These cost savings might be attributed to the compensation for
the benefits that were gained by suppliers from collaboration (e.g. lower prices of input materials). As
for environmental collaboration with customers, it contributes to performance of F&B processors
indirectly: environmentalcollaboration with customers prompts sustainable improvements in the
internal processes and these improved processes bring about improved performance both in terms of
cost savings and market gains.

Our findings confirm the great potential of inter-firm linkages to enhance firm performance (Dyer and
Singh, 1998) in the context of environmental collaboration. Prior research mostly investigated a direct
contribution of environmental collaboration to firm performance, although an investigation of
potential indirect relationships was suggested to clarify inconclusive results (Gimenez and Tachizawa,
2012). The discussion on multiple pathways through which collaboration can improve firm
performance in the general collaboration literature (i.e. Moller and T € orr € onen (2003), Lavie €
(2006), Cao and Zhang (2011)), is hardly reflected in the environmental collaboration literature. Our
findings show that in a context of different dyads, the actual process improvements can occur
primarily on one side. Consequently, when the improvements do not occur on the side of the focal
firm, it is more difficult to appropriate the value from environmental collaboration like in case of Dutch
F&B processors engaged in environmental collaboration with suppliers.

Our finding that environmental collaboration is likely to generate sustainable process improvements
primarily on the side of the seller corresponds to the findings from the case studies of Hall (2000). In
the sample of Chiou et al. (2011), environmental collaboration with the suppliers resulted in
sustainable process improvements on the side of the focal firm (buyer). However, their sample
primarily consisted of medium-tech firms whose suppliers could have more opportunities to change
their output to reduce its environmental impact. Findings similar to Chiou et al. (2011) were reported
by Geffen and Rothenberg (2000) in the context of the mid-tech automotive industry. Therefore,
future research should address the role of industry characteristics and characteristics of suppliers and
customers when discussing the appropriation of the outcomes from environmental collaboration.

For manufacturing managers, our study generates important implications as it delineates more paths
of control over the outcomes of environmental collaboration. Most importantly, environmental
collaboration with customers and suppliers does not automatically lead to performance
improvements. The result of environmental collaboration with suppliers depends on the suppliers'
characteristics and the ability to induce environmentally sustainable process improvements on the
focal firm's side. When such improvements do not occur, firms face difficulties appropriating
economic outcomes of environmental collaboration. Our results show that in the F&B processors
sector, cost savings from environmental collaboration with suppliers are likely but this relationship is
not very strong (p < 0.10). The customers of F&B processors seem not to reward their efforts in
greening the suppliers: environmental collaboration with suppliers is not associated with market gains
such as higher product prices, market share or product quality. For firms seeking to improve
sustainability of their processes through environmental collaboration, working together with
customers can be of assistance. However, they would be able to improve their performance only if
this collaboration brings about improvements of internal processes. Customers do not reward
environmental collaboration when their suppliers do not actually change internal processes to make
them more sustainable.

Next to discussing present paper's contributions for academics and practitioners, we have to
acknowledge some limitations that open avenues for future research. First, we focused on
environmentally sustainable process improvements as one of the collaborative advantage
constituents. Future studies should include other types of value created in collaboration, such as
improved flexibility and other types of business synergies (Cao and Zhang, 2011). Second, conditions
and pathways for environmental collaboration to improve business performance should be examined
further. Position in a dyad, partners' characteristics (Kaufman et al., 2000; Schiele, 2006), bargaining
power, the absorptive capacity of the partners (Lavie, 2006) and other characteristics of the dyad and
of the partners could moderate discovered indirect effects. Third, future research could extend the
framework to horizontal collaboration in addition to vertical environmental collaboration with
suppliers and customers. The interests of vertical supply chain partners might be more aligned
towards the maximizing value in the supply chain. Horizontally, partners might compete for the share
of the profit margin on the certain level of the supply chain. Therefore, while studying the
appropriation of the benefits from environmental collaboration, it would be also interesting to look at
the horizontal collaboration. Fourth, we observed that Dutch F&B processors investing in
environmental collaboration with suppliers cannot appropriate corresponding return. Considering
past findings (Green et al., 2012; Hall, 2000), we concluded that corresponding benefits are occurring
on the supplier's side. Data collection from Dutch F&B processors at one stage of supply chain enable
to make suggestions about costs and benefits distribution. We believe that our findings provide a good
foundation for future research that could validate our findings with the data collected on multiple
supply chain stages. Lastly, rents from environmental collaboration can accumulate gradually, like
relational rents (Dyer and Singh, 1998) or spillover rents (Lavie, 2006). These rents, invisible in the
short-run, can cause significant long run benefits. Therefore, longitudinal studies could validate our
findings with respect to the long-run implications of environmental collaboration.