Case studies of 10 exemplar firms are used to build a coherent and testable model of the elements necessary to create a sustainable supply chain. The cases build on previous research by examining the ...chain as an entirety, by explicitly examining both the social and environmental outcomes of the chain's activities, and by explicitly asking what these exemplar organizations are doing that is unique in regards to managing their supply chains in a sustainable manner. The analysis suggests that the practices that lead to a more sustainable supply chain are equal parts best practices in traditional supply chain management and new behaviors, some of which run counter to existing accepted “best” practice.
This paper investigates the importance of quality management practices for the success of environmental management initiatives. It has been recently established that sustainability initiatives ...whether in terms of social or environmental investments can improve organizational performance. Additionally, some authors have suggested striking similarities between environmental and quality practices and argued that a well functioning quality management system is a prerequisite for a successful environmental management system. However, it may be the case that having a well functioning quality management system enables a company to reap higher returns from its environmental management practices. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of quality management in the environmental management—performance relationship. Specifically, we assess whether or not quality management practices interact with environmental practices to drive operational performance. This question was tested with survey data collected from 1142 plants. The study makes significant contributions to the quality and sustainability literature and implications are drawn to practice.
Managers are increasingly faced with pressure to think not just about profits, but also about their organization's environmental and social performance. This research provides a first examination of ...operational managers' experiences with and attitudes about employee well‐being and environmental issues, how these factors impact employee well‐being and environmental performance, and how the three performance measures interrelate. We use violations of Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations and Toxic Release Inventory reports of emissions as proxies for employee well‐being and environmental performance. Our findings suggest that operational managers do not (yet) think in sustainability terms. However, employee well‐being and environmental performance do interact in a significant way with operational performance. Hence, operational managers would benefit from a more complete understanding of the relationships among the elements of the triple bottom line.
Operations management scholars have long debated the right level of slack resources required to optimize a production system. Recent research suggests that the right level of operational slack, ...typically in the form of inventory, is very little but not none. However, this conclusion was reached without considering the role of slack resources in occupational safety, which is a critical oversight since the safety literature predicts that the reduction of operational slack harms workers. To address this gap, secondary data from 3945 publically listed U.S. firms is used to explore the role of operational and financial slack as well as market factors in occupational safety. The results show that decreasing operational slack harms workers and that this effect is mitigated when firms hold higher levels of financial slack. Furthermore, the external market environment also plays a crucial role in the operational slack – safety relationship.
Companies have reacted to the opportunities and threats of globalization through numerous production practices that have increased supply chain complexity. One of the ways companies have been able to ...manage this increased level of complexity is by integrating their supply chains. Logistical capabilities at the company level play a key role in integrating global supply chains, but logistical capabilities need not be company specific. In this study we explore the role of a country's logistical capabilities in external supply chain integration. Our results indicate that plants situated in countries with superior levels of logistical capabilities adopt significantly lower levels of external supply chain integration. Additionally, plants situated in countries with superior logistical capabilities do not gain the same performance benefits from external integration as plants situated in countries with relatively low levels of logistical capabilities.
Operations and supply chain management (OSCM) scholars have generally not engaged in the robust discourse over the extent and implications of science's replication crisis, perhaps because replication ...studies remain exceedingly rare in the discipline. In this manuscript, I encourage more replications. However, I also assume that such studies will remain rare. Therefore, it is argued that the replication crisis in OSCM can be partially addressed by conducting theory testing and refining research in a more systematic fashion that acknowledges researchers' and journals' incentives to publish new knowledge, while also efficiently helping to ensure that the foundations of that new knowledge are generalizable and not based on idiosyncratic, spurious, or questionable findings. Hence, I focus on ways to conduct a replication within a larger theory testing or refining study in a manner that makes it possible to explain the results, even if they differ from past research. This is achieved via enhanced transparency, designing research to include tests of nomological validity and account for the possibility that the results will not replicate, and more careful consideration of controls. The payoff from this investment in designing replication logic into theory testing and refining research would be that in the course of conducting normal science, we would be able to make much stronger claims about the veracity of our theories, facts, and predictions.
The relationship between managing a production system to be safe and managing it to be operationally effective is often described in conflicting terms, creating confusion for research and practice. ...Some view improving safety as separate and distinct from increasing operational effectiveness; they are contradictory requirements. Others emphasize that safety and effectiveness are complementary, and combine to enhance competitiveness. Recent research proposes that this confusion can be explained by examining the operational and safety routines used in production. Specifically, when an organization chooses to manage safety and operations in a coordinated fashion using a joint management system, safety and operational effectiveness are complementary. Yet, the contradiction between safety and operations can occur when the functions are managed as separate and unequal silos. This research tests this supposition using the theory of relational coordination. The results, based on a combination of survey and archival safety data from 198 manufacturing firms, show that safety and operational outcomes are indirectly related via routines and that plants that manage safety and operations using a joint management system make these priorities complementary and do not create trade-offs between safety and operational performance.
The need for environmental protection and increasing demands for natural resources are forcing companies to reconsider their business models and restructure their supply chain operations. Scholars ...and proactive companies have begun to create more sustainable supply chains. What has not been fully addressed is how organizations deal with short-term pressures to remain economically viable while implementing these newly modeled supply chains. In this study, we use theory-building through case studies to answer the question: how do organizations balance short-term profitability and long-term environmental sustainability when making supply chain decisions under conditions of uncertainty? We present five sets of propositions that explain how exemplars in green supply chain management make decisions and balance short and long term objectives. We also identify four environmental postures that help explain the decisions organizations make when dealing with strategic trade-offs among the economic, environmental and social elements of the triple-bottom-line.
In the last two decades, the topic of sustainability has moved from the fringes of supply chain management research to the mainstream and is now an area of significant research activity. In this ...paper, we argue that while this increase in acceptance and activity is welcome and has lead to a greater understanding of sustainability, our present knowledge is not sufficient to create truly sustainable supply chains. We build on this insight to identify five main issues that future research needs to address. We argue that when it comes to the theory of sustainable supply chain management, previous research has focused on the synergistic and familiar while overlooking trade‐offs and radical innovation. These theoretical issues are compounded by measures that do not truly capture a supply chain's impacts and methods that are better at looking backwards than forwards. The paper concludes by proposing a series of recommendations that address these issues to help in the development of truly sustainable supply chains.
The role of employee safety in supply chain performance has inexplicably been overlooked by operations management literature. With a few notable exceptions, there is no guidance in the literature for ...operations managers trying to understand the role that employee safety at their own or a suppliers could play in quality outcomes. This manuscript takes a first step to rectify this oversight by using cognitive dissonance theory to build a series of propositions that link safety perceptions to quality outcomes. Empirical tests of these propositions provide initial evidence that safety does indeed contribute to quality outcomes in the supply chain.
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