Sharing environmental management information with supply chain partners and the performance contingencies on environmental munificence

The literature on production economics has highlighted the importance of information exchange with supply chain partners for achieving performance gains. In addition to managing information to enable product flows, trading enterprises increasingly emphasize environmental management information (EMI) sharing with their upstream suppliers and downstream customers to satisfy their environmental quests. This study seeks to investigate the performance value of EMI sharing with supply chain partners in a trading context from the resources dependence perspective. Using survey responses collected from 210 trading firms in Hong Kong, we find that EMI sharing with suppliers can bring cost and environmental performance, but not profit related benefits. The cost and environmental performance benefits due to EMI sharing with suppliers are more salient when the trading firms operate at high environmental munificence. On the other hand, the results show positive effects in profit and cost performance when the trading firms disclose EMI with their customers. Nevertheless, such sharing with customers brings no environmental related benefits. Managers should understand the performance effects of EMI with supply chain partners and formulate action plans considering environmental munificence to increase their performance success.