An Integrated Framework to assess the Impact of Sustainable Supply Chain Management Practices on Firms’ Performance

The increasing importance of the ongoing sustainability movement in both academia and industrial sectors has significantly influenced the broad filed of supply chain management. Recently, many multinational firms have recognised the concept of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and started to accept the necessity of environmental management and launched a number of proactive sustainable practices across their supply chains in order to compete in the global market. Nevertheless, the current knowledge about the impact of SSCM adoption on firms’ performance is limited. Previous studies have revealed that organisations seldom gain the potential competitive advantage offered by environmental management programmes. In addition, a number of researchers raised the question of whether or not embracing sustainable practices within the supply chain really pays off, as they did not find a significant direct link between SSCM practices and firms’ economic performance and consequently this issue remained inconclusive.
Hence, this paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating the relationships between the successful adoption of SSCM practices and organisational performance to understand whether the effective implementation of SSCM practice leads to improved environmental performance and enhance overall financial performance of firms. More specifically, this study explores the linkage between greening the supply chain and environmental and economic performance of manufacturing firms.
To support this development, an integrated framework of sustainable supply chain management performance has been conceptualised based on the institutional and resource based view theory. This research provides practitioners with a framework to assess the impact of SSCM practices on firms’ environmental and economic performance. Moreover, this work enables manufacturing firms with validated measurement scales to identify particular areas of SSCM where acceptance and improvements are required, facilitating the prioritisation of their green efforts.