Sustainability in Logistics Service Quality: Evidence from Agri-Food Supply Chain in Ukraine

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore which attributes of logistics service quality (LSQ) are associated with the superior LSQ in rural territories of the developing economy of Ukraine. The data were collected from 52 Ukrainian agrarian companies. Ukraine was chosen because of the high potential of its agricultural sector, which has been one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural goods for years. This paper investigates LSQ from the perspective of agri-businesses and addresses sustainability. The primary data were obtained in a survey of clustered samples of agri-businesses in rural Ukraine. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted with the Stata 16 software to test one hypothesis. This study builds on the expectancy–disconfirmation paradigm in service management research and the related service quality in order to compare the perceived and expected quality of social and environmental sustainability-related aspects of LSQ to test two hypotheses. The findings revealed that service quality in agricultural logistics is a five-dimensional construct. Its five dimensions are reliability, digital transformation, corporate image, environmental sustainability, and quality of customer focus. Furthermore, the study delivers evidence that the perceived and expected quality of the social sustainability-related aspects of LSQ are substantially different. As the study’s data collection process was interrupted by the Russian–Ukrainian war, the proposed model was only tested with 52 enterprises in an agri-food supply chain in rural Ukraine. Such a small sample is one of the study’s limitations. The research has great managerial implications as managers can use the explored attributes as a basis for customer satisfaction analyses or benchmarking in agricultural logistics. This is the first work exploring LSQ in rural Ukraine. The major contributions of this paper are the explored dimensions of LSQ with EFA. The study presents the first and most current data about LSQ from four united territorial communities in the rural center of Ukraine.