Gaining or losing? The social capital perspective on supply chain members’ knowledge sharing of green practices

Abstract

To accelerate the reform of green management, organisations need to adopt new green practices to seek knowledge through inter-firm environmental collaboration. In order to promote knowledge sharing, it is important to know how organisations evaluate the logic behind their green practices, i.e. gaining or losing, by referring to crucial supply chain networks. We identified factors that were considered influential in adopting a new practice through the social capital perspective and also examined their impact on the green supply chain. This study used the partial least square method to analyse the green management performances of 160 Taiwanese firms. The results suggest that cognitive capital significantly affects knowledge sharing behaviours among supply chain members. Furthermore, while the structural capital had a significant effect on knowledge inflows, its influence on the outflows of knowledge was limited. Both the inflows and outflows of knowledge considerably influence green management performance. The findings indicated that supply chain social capital plays an important role in implementing the logic of adopting green practices and also aids network members in obtaining individually required resources.