Stakeholder Pressures, Environmental Practice Adoption and Economic Performance in the German Third-party Logistics Industry-A Contingency Perspective

摘要

This study explores how companies adopt environmental practices when they are exposed to stakeholder pressures and how those practices affect economic performance within the German third-party logistics industry. The relationships are tested against a random sample of 192 German third-party logistics providers by using a higher-order partial least squares approach. The study reveals that perceived stakeholder pressures, especially internal, market, and regulatory pressures, strongly influence third-party logistics providers' environmental practice adoption and that environmental practice adoption improves economic performance. Moreover, by introducing complexity of service offerings as an important firm-related contextual variable, the study advances our knowledge as it highlights that companies with basic service offerings can benefit more from adopting environmental practices than companies with advanced service offerings.