Sustainability-oriented cross-functional collaboration to manage trade-offs and interdependencies

Abstract

Despite a consensus view in the literature about the importance of cross-functional collaboration (CFC) for corporate environmental performance improvement, there is a dearth of studies that explain how exactly sustainability-oriented CFC can foster this objective. The purpose of this paper is to explain the role of CFC in corporate environmental performance improvement. We do this by undertaking two rounds of literature review, developing a proposition after the first round and by collecting illuminative real-life examples that illustrate our arguments in the second round. We propose and illustrate that CFC can effectively address two systemic properties of corporate environmental performance: trade-offs and interdependencies among different aspects of corporate environmental sustainability. If left unaddressed, these systemic specifics would result in organizational, managerial, and behavioral outcomes, such as inertia, opposition to change, lack of information, and so on, which would turn into effective barriers to corporate environmental performance improvement. put CFC addresses these barriers through information sharing, knowledge building, and interest reconciliation.