Sustainable supply chain management: the role of supply management improvement programs and global sourcing

Sustainability, intended as including in companies’ strategies and practices environmental and social aspects, is an always more relevant topic, not only internally, in their organizations, but also along their supply chains. In this paper we specifically address how three variables, namely “sustainable” supply chain management, “traditional” supply chain management and global sourcing interact each other to determine higher or lower sustainability performance. We assessed these relationships on the base of the fifth edition of the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS), based on a sample of more than 400 companies. Our results show that the implementation of sustainable supply chain initiatives is positively associated with higher performance levels, but also that a fundamental contribution comes from “traditional” supply chain management. Next, companies that have many global suppliers, despite the difficulties, can achieve comparable performance than competitors with local suppliers, but they have to rely much more on sustainable supply chain management initiatives. These findings provide support to previous works, significantly expand literature thresholds and are useful to practitioners, regulators and researchers interested in developing their understanding of the sustainability phenomenon.