The Influence of the Eco-Control Package on Environmental and Economic Performance: A Natural Resource-Based Approach

ABSTRACT While a growing body of literature has examined and demonstrated the influence of eco-control on organizational performance, little is known about how this influence occurs within the organization. Building on a natural resource-based view, the aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the eco-control package supports environmental capabilities that, in turn, contribute to an organization's environmental and economic performance. Using survey data from a sample of Canadian manufacturing firms, the results of this study suggest that eco-control may constitute a mechanism that can support environmental capabilities in order to contribute to a firm's environmental and economic performance. More specifically, these results suggest that the eco-control package fosters eco-learning, continuous environmental innovation, stakeholder integration, and shared environmental vision capabilities that can, in turn, contribute both directly to the firm's environmental performance and indirectly to economic performance. Also, some evidence suggests that different eco-control practices support different environmental capabilities and that the simultaneous use of several eco-control practices seems to be necessary to support the implementation of a complete set of environmental capabilities.