Investigating green supply chain management practices and performance: The moderating roles of supply chain ecocentricity and traceability

摘要

Purpose Sustainable supply chain management has become an increasingly important driver of business performance. Understanding the contingent nature of how performance is improved in this context is therefore a critical task for management. The purpose of this paper is to explore the moderating effects of two practices unique to sustainable supply chain - ecocentricity and supply chain traceability - on a firm's environmental and operating cost performance. Design/methodology/approach Survey data were collected from 248 UK manufacturing firms and analyzed using moderated hierarchical regression. Findings The results suggest that green supply chain management (GSCM) practices are associated with improvements in both environmental and cost-based performance. Further, higher levels of ecocentricity and supply chain traceability are associated with stronger relationships between GSCM practices and cost performance. Contrary to expectations, high levels of supply chain traceability were found to negatively moderate the relationship between GSCM practices and environmental performance.Originality/value This paper offers several contributions to the research in this area. First, the authors develop and validate a measurement scale for ecocentricity and supply chain traceability. Second, the authors show how these two variables - unique to sustainable supply chains - can positively influence firm and environmental performance.