Abstract: Respect for the environment has rapidly gained importance in the context of firms, regardless their level of pollution. Most of the research has been related to the most polluting sectors and is limited to the effect on performance of the adoption of cleaner practices primarily in terms of operations, financial performance and competitiveness. This paper expands the research towards a more complete picture of environmental management by examining context, development and performance to understand how other factors can influence the development of cleaner practices. In addition, we focus our research on a service sector. In our analysis, we differentiated between the affiliation and size of the companies to better understand their specificities. Based on a sample of 374 restaurants, the results show the importance of the influence of institutions and the limited influence of competitors in encouraging firms to adopt new management practices, especially for smaller firms.