Abstract
Confronted with urgent green requirements from customers and government, firms in high pollution and high resource-consuming industries must make changes and adopt green strategies as well as knowledge-management strategies to develop and sell green products to improve sustainable competitive advantage. To study how to leverage social networks to improve sustainable competitive advantage, our article sheds light on the effects of structural holes in the distributor network as well as in the supplier network and explores how mutual trust could moderate the impact of structural holes in both networks. Based on data from 122 matched pairs of suppliers and distributors of a high-pollution and high-resource-consuming industry, the Chinese paper-making industry, our empirical results demonstrate the positive effects of structural holes in the distributor and the supplier networks on the distributor sustainable competitive advantage. In addition, mutual trust could negatively moderate the relationship between structural holes in the distributor network and the distributor sustainable competitive advantage, but would positively moderate the relationship between structural holes in the supplier network and the distributor sustainable competitive advantage.
Highlights
With rapid economic development in China, high pollution and high resource-consumption are important issues for firms and the government to be confronted with, it is imperative for firms to develop and sell green, novel products to satisfy the needs of customers and government, and to improve sustainable competitive advantage
Sustainability 2018, 10, 2038 in a network simultaneously, we propose that interorganizational trust would differently affect the effects of structural holes in the distributor network and the supplier network to improve the distributor sustainable competitive advantage
As the combination of structural holes and mutual trust provides a new understanding for knowledge management, we explore how the strategies of knowledge management influences the performance of social networks in this article [36,37,38]
Summary
With rapid economic development in China, high pollution and high resource-consumption are important issues for firms and the government to be confronted with, it is imperative for firms to develop and sell green, novel products to satisfy the needs of customers and government, and to improve sustainable competitive advantage. As social networks are increasingly important sources of superior green performance and sustainable competitive advantage [19,20,21], firms need to acquire knowledge for developing and selling green products by effectively leveraging social networks [2,22]. The network structure, providing signals about its knowledge background, would influence the decision of the focal firm to cooperate for developing and selling novel, green products [24,26]. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate how the distributor could leverage both the distributor network and supplier network to develop and sell novel, green products to improve sustainable competitive advantage, and how mutual trust could moderate the network-sustainable competitive advantage relationships in both networks. We enrich the boundary of both social network theory and sustainable competitive advantage literature
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
