Our results have three significant implications for managers. First, managers should simultaneously implement lean and green practices. Indeed, our study highlights the importance of timing in the introduction of lean and green practices. Timing affects different aspects of the interaction between lean and green practices, such as the types of interdependencies (sequential and reciprocal), the search for supplier partners, and the results in terms of performance. Second, the general defensive attitude of managers toward the environmental versus economic tradeoffs (Pagell and Gobeli, 2009) must be overcome. Managers do need to integrate green practices with manufacturing practices in order to maximize their performance consequences. Finally, in order to simultaneously implement lean and green practices, we argue that it is necessary to combine resources and capabilities that are generated in two different functional areas, i.e., operations and the environmental, thus calling for a strict collaboration of environmental managers and operations managers in order to leverage their existing capabilities and develop new ones.
This study has a number of limitations. First, we draw on three case studies of two multinational firms from highly environmentally regulated industries that have similar production processes and similar stakeholder pressures about environmental aspects. Though these factors help to control the possible noise of the external environment, they also limit the generalizability of our results. Thus, we suppose that our results hold true in firms with a strong commitment to both lean production and environmental management that operate in manufacturing industries that face issues in the decision-making processes similar to our case studies. Moreover, our results are relevant for those firms that adopt pollutant-production processes, such as painting and cleaning (Maxwell et al., 1998 and Rothenberg et al., 2001). Further research should investigate whether our results can be replicated in other industries and in more complex, uncertain, and/or munificent business environments in which the deployment of environmental practices might be hindered (Aragon-Correa and Sharma, 2003).
Second, as our focus is on the managerial approach related to the implementation of lean and green practices, our pollution-prevention projects do not allow us to understand which factors may influence the selection of sequential or simultaneous implementations. We particularly do not investigate whether the types of projects, organizational characteristics, and other contextual variables have somehow affected the implementation of lean and green practices. Thus, further qualitative research may help to exclude this possibility.
Finally, the present study is unable to provide insights about the moderating effects of plant-level characteristics (e.g., size, equipment age, management behavior, competitive priorities, etc.). Future research may adopt a quantitative approach to assess whether and to what extent these moderation effects exist.