Bilateral (HK) - How partner firms coordinate their environmental management practices? Green supply chain integration and its performance implication

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In recent years many firms from developed and developing countries have seriously started to initiate green supply chain management to achieve greater efficiency and reduce environmental impacts of their supply chains. To become greener, many firms have now realized the need to collaborate or integrate with their supply chain partners to implement environmental management. Such efforts are noted from the participation of more than 120 companies, including British Telecom Group, Vospre Thornycroft Group Plc, Kraft Foods, IKEA, Levi Strauss and Co., and others, in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative, where firms measure carbon emissions of their product life cycle and supply chains. In the management literature, there is a paucity of knowledge about how firms may effectively coordinate environmental management across their supply chains, and most importantly, how firms can achieve desirable environmental performance throughout a supply chain without compromising their operational performance. Even though some recent studies indicate that environmental collaboration (collaboration with suppliers and customers in environmental management) could lead to both better operational and environmental performance, the effectiveness of such a concept is yet to be thoroughly proven and understood.This research elevates the concept of environmental collaboration to a novel concept called Green Supply Chain Integration (GSCI), which is a more strategic and integrative approach to achieving green supply chain performance. The research plans to identify the effective practices of Green Supply Chain Integration that can simultaneously improve operational and environmental performance of firms from developing and developed countries (Hong Kong, China, Thailand and UK). It will reveal the complementary effects of various Green Supply Chain Integration practices and factors such as regulation, competitive priority, supply chain structure which may support or inhibit such efforts. This research is importance because most supply chains are globally fragmented and yet every firm needs to simultaneously achieve superior operational and environmental performance. It is a timely research because the needs to effectively coordinate environmental practices in a global supply chain have now been recognised but there is a lack of insights into how breakthrough in operational and environmental performance can be achieved.