Transmission of CSR requirements in supply chains: investigating the multiple mediating effects of CSR activities in SMEs

ABSTRACT

In recent years, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the separate areas of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and supply chain management (SCM). However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the transmission of CSR requirements from a small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) perspective. Drawing on institutional and innovation diffusion theories, this paper investigates to what extent the CSR requirements of customers influence the CSR activities of SMEs and their CSR requirements toward their own suppliers. Multiple mediation analysis was performed on data from a sample of 146,060 French SMEs. The findings indicate that the CSR requirements of customers have a direct negative effect on SMEs’ CSR requirements toward suppliers. However, the relationship becomes positive when we take into account the mediating role of the SMEs’ own CSR activities (i.e. economic, social and environmental activities). Furthermore, the study reveals that the indirect effect through economic CSR activities is the greatest, followed by social and then environmental CSR activities. Our main contribution is that implementing CSR activities within SMEs is a necessary step so that SMEs can be brokers in the transmission of CSR requirements in the supply chain.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate social responsibility
• sustainable supply chain
• sustainability
• small-to medium-sized enterprise

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• M14
• M13
• L21

Acknowledgements

Montpellier Business School (MBS) is a founding member of the public research center Montpellier Research in Management, MRM (EA 4557, Univ. Montpellier).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Further information is available on: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2116964?sommaire=2116967#consulter.

² Bootstrapping is a computationally intensive method that involves repeatedly sampling from the data set and estimating the indirect effect in each resampled data set. By repeating this process thousands of times, an empirical approximation of the sampling distribution of ab is built and used to construct confidence intervals for the indirect effect.

³ The Law on New Economic Regulations (NRE) required that French listed companies disclose information in their annual report about measures taken to account for the environmental and social impacts of their activities.