The relationship between corporate sustainability and performance: an analysis of agri-food cooperatives

The aim of the research is twofold: to investigate the corporate sustainability profile of agri-food cooperatives and to analyze its impact on cooperative performance. This study attempts to fill a gap in the literature represented by the limited investigation of sustainability according to the integrated approach proposed by the Triple Bottom Line. This study applies the Structural Equation Modeling on data provided by the administration of a questionnaire to the managers of a sample of Italian cooperatives operating in the agri-food sector, selected among the members of the General Association of Italian Cooperatives. The results show that environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability are relevant to shape the cooperatives corporate sustainability, but they do not impact the agri-food cooperatives performance. Consequently, the cooperative's management should give more consideration to renewable energy practices and make sustainability practices positively influence the cooperative's performance through: increasing internal communication strategies, moving from competition to coopetition, developing skills to make sustainability a performance enhancing factor. Furthermore, cooperative management should improve the external communication strategies used to communicate the adopted sustainability practices, in order to make sure that the knowledge of the sustainability profile by the market leads to an increase in consumer loyalty.