Abstract
This paper explores the cumulative sustainable supply chain (SC) capabilities and their effects on supply chain performance, including economic, environmental, and social performance. Using empirical analyses with data from 198 small- and medium-sized suppliers in Korea, this paper provides evidence about the cumulative sustainable SC capabilities, indicating that economic, social, and environmental capabilities in the supply chain mutually reinforce each other rather than traded off. This study also presents the positive effect of cumulative sustainable SC capabilities on supply chain sustainability performance. This paper identifies four distinctive groups of cumulative capabilities: the laggard, environmental-focused, social-cautious, and all-round. This study provides a better understanding about sustainable capabilities and important guidelines for managers of suppliers and buyers who wish to build strong social/environmental management capabilities without compromising economic capability throughout the entire supply chain.
Highlights
The last decade has witnessed the emergence of sustainability issues as one of the most important business concerns in a firm’s supply chain
All positive and significant pairs of correlations support each capability, enhancing the accumulation of the other capabilities, with no apparent trade-offs. These revealed that the supply chain firms were not trading off an emphasis in the development in social or environmental capabilities for economic capabilities
This paper proposed an integrated concept of sustainable SC capabilities by combining diverse concepts of capabilities, supply chain management, and the triple bottom line
Summary
The last decade has witnessed the emergence of sustainability issues as one of the most important business concerns in a firm’s supply chain. The triple bottom line, indicating the combination of economic, social, and environmental performances, continues to spread out throughout the industries [3] To increase such triple bottom line, environmental and social criteria must be integrated into performance objectives for the management of individual firms, and the entire supply chain [4] because firms’ performance heavily relies on their supply chain. This is why the management of environmental and social issues in the supply chain, namely sustainable supply chain management (hereafter sustainable SCM), has been increasingly paid much attention.
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