The role of firm-internal corporate environmental standards for organizational performance

Firms’ environmental approaches frequently encompass strategies for pollution prevention and product stewardship. We apply resource-based theorizing to determine how these two strategies affect the likelihood that a firm will adopt firm-internal environmental-management standards and how such standards relate to organizational performance. We find that pollution prevention improves firms’ competitiveness by enabling the implementation of firm-internal standards that subsequently have positive effects on profitability. © 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.