Motives and Performance Outcomes of Sustainable Supply Chain Management Practices: A Multi-theoretical Perspective

By Antony Paulraj, Injazz J. Chen, Constantin Blome. 2017

325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many researchers believe the tremendous industrial development over the past two centuries is unsustainable because it has led to unintended ecological deterioration. Despite the ever-growing attention sustainable supply-chain management (SSCM) has received, most SSCM research and models look at the consequences, rather than the antecedents or motives of such responsible practices. The few studies that explore corporate motives have remained largely qualitative, and large-scale empirical analyses are scarce. Drawing on multiple theories and combining supply-chain and business ethics literature, we purport that instrumental, relational, and moral motives are behind a firm’s engagement in SSCM practices. Specifically, we examine the links between corporate motives, SSCM practices, and firm performance. Using a sample of 259 supply-chain firms in Germany, we empirically test five hypothesized relationships. Our results reveal that relational and moral motives are key drivers, and that firms exhibiting high levels of moral obligations tend to outperform those primarily driven by amoral considerations. Findings of this study contribute to multiple literatures espousing sustainability management and can help policy makers, stakeholder groups, and scholars develop more robust strategies for encouraging firms to practice SSCM.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac5b3b3d49b0d45fac84c006a4968b17bbe00e53

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Information Systems

1. H. Hofmann
2. Paavo Ritala
3. Nancy M. P. Bocken
4. Martin C. Schleper
5. Constantin Blome

In Marketing

1. Laura Albareda
2. Muhammad Amad Saeed
3. Paavo Ritala
4. Wolfgang Kersten
5. Kaisu Puumalainen
6. Nancy M. P. Bocken
7. Martin C. Schleper
8. Pontus Huotari

In Strategy and Management

1. Paavo Ritala
2. Laura Albareda
3. H. Hofmann
4. Muhammad Amad Saeed
5. Wolfgang Kersten
6. Kaisu Puumalainen
7. Nancy M. P. Bocken
8. Martin C. Schleper

Citations in the corpus

• Drivers of Sustainable Supply Chain Management: Identification and Classification (2019, background): “Code of business conduct Provides common and standardized decisions, procedures, and systems that meet the expectations of its stakeholders [40,44].”
• Conflict Minerals and Supply Chain Due Diligence: An Exploratory Study of Multi-tier Supply Chains (2017, background): “Third, it remains unclear if the real intentions of companies are what they pretend to be, or if at least some of them just act in a mode of paying lip-service (Chen et al. 2015).”
• Sustainable business model adoption among S&P 500 firms: A longitudinal content analysis study (2018, background): “Thus, large corporations are also held responsible for the impacts caused by their partners (Paulraj et al., 2015).”