Does Supply Chain Concentration Affect the Performance of Corporate Environmental Responsibility? The Moderating Effect of Technology Uncertainty

Abstract

With the development of society and the improvement of environmental consciousness, the performance of corporate environmental responsibility (CER) has elicited increasing attention in recent years. In previous studies, the exploration of the antecedents of CER is far less evident than the exploration of its results, and only few studies have investigated what determines CER engagement from the perspective of supply chain concentration (SCC). Using data from 2413 firms in China from 2013 to 2019, our study uses the fixed effect model and performs multiple robustness tests to examine the impact of SCC on the fulfillment of CER, its transmission mechanism, and the moderating role of technology uncertainty (TU). Empirical results show that SCC has a pivotal negative impact on CER performance, wherein both supplier concentration (SUP) and customer concentration (CUS) are detrimental to CER performance. Further mechanism analysis shows that such negative effect can be explained by the adverse effect of SCC on the operating cash flow (OCF), in which OCF has a partial mediating effect. Moreover, the negative impact of SCC on CER performance is more significant when the uncertainty of firms’ technological environment is stronger. Our study opens the transmission “black box” between SCC and CER performance and incorporates the behaviors of firms, inter-firm relationships, and environmental factors into the same research framework, and provides a theoretical guidance for management practices.