Intelligent, Sustainable Supply Chain Management: A Configurational Strategy to Improve Ecological Sustainability through Digitization

Abstract

The Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) research indicates a favorable correlation between sustainability practices and company efficiency. Companies possess constrained resources for implementing competitive strategies and campaigns, presenting managers with difficulty determining which sustainability efforts to prioritize. Two viable solutions to this difficulty are integrating Supply Chain (SC) agility with sustainable practices and employing the Resource Orchestrating Theory (ROT) framework to assist SC executives in making better informed sustainability-related choices. This study examines several potential pairings of corporate and SC sustainability strategies and SC agility that enhance company performance. This research employs the Resource-Dependence Theory and utilizes a configurational technique with a qualitative comparative method. The results demonstrate that superior sustainability outcomes are achieved via many pathways (equifinality), involving both elevated and diminished levels of each suggested sustainability effort and SC agility (asymmetry). The results indicate that outcomes are contingent upon the combination of behaviors rather than their impacts.