Sustainable procurement performance of large enterprises across supply chain tiers and geographic regions

Abstract

Sustainable procurement is steering today’s supply chains towards responsible business practices. This research aims to examine the trend in the sustainability performance of large enterprises for supplier selection across supply chain tiers and geographic locations. Secondary data on 83 global, large enterprises discussing sustainable procurement practices are analysed using hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Dynamic capabilities view and stakeholder theory are utilised to develop the hypotheses. The results show that sustainable procurement performance for large enterprises varies across supply chain tiers and increases in the direction of the end customer. Due to standardisation of regulations and dynamic capabilities of global, large enterprises, no significant difference is observed across geographic regions.

Keywords:

• sustainable procurement
• supplier selection
• large enterprises
• regression analysis
• multi-tier supply chains
• dynamic capabilities view
• stakeholder theory

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers and AE for their encouraging and constructive comments for improving the overall quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Abhijeet Ghadge http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0310-2761

Arnab Bhattacharjee http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1300-0838