Antecedents and Performance Outcomes of Responsible Purchasing and Supply Practices

An area within green supply chain management (GSCM) that has received lesser attention consists of environmental practices that are carried out within the purchasing and supply function of firms. In the present research on responsible purchasing and supply practices we build on extant literature and investigate how buyers encourage and engage supply partners to follow suit in their environmental endeavors. We define responsible purchasing and supply practices (RPSP) as consisting of both environmental requirements and evaluation dimensions placed on the supplier (green sourcing practices), and joint green activities with suppliers that aim to reduce the environmental impact in a combined effort (joint green practices).

Within this context, the contributions of this study are three-fold. First, drawing from tenets of institutional theory, we theorize the positive influence of green organizational engagement on RPSP, with the former being triggered by institutional pressure. Green organizational engagement is defined as the firm’s general conviction to environmental concerns and the ensuing internal company climate, and institutional pressure is defined as a stimulus that can influence firm behavior (we consider the classic three dimensions of coercive, normative and mimetic pressure).

Second, relying on arguments from resource-advantage theory, we hypothesize RPSP to lead to environmental performance benefits, which in turn are suggested to yield both enhanced new product performance and quality performance. We define environmental performance as the firm’s improvement (or deterioration) in terms of pollution production and resource consumption, new product performance as the firm’s improvement (or deterioration) in its ability to develop, design and modify new products, and quality performance as the firm’s improvement (or deterioration) in its ability to product products that are durable, reliable and conforming to specifications.

And third, building and extending these notions, we theorize about the mediating roles of corporate green engagement, RPSP, and environmental performance. Specifically, we hypothesize for corporate green engagement to mediate the relationship between institutional pressure and RPSP, and for RPSP to mediate the relationship between corporate green engagement and environmental performance. In addition, we suggest environmental performance to serve as a mediator between RPSP and both new product performance and quality performance. We test these contentions with survey data collected among purchasing and supply professionals in the U.S. manufacturing industry.