مسئولیت سازمانی، مشارکت زنجیره تامین و عملکرد : بررسی تجربی

Unlike corporate and business levels, there is little research examining corporate responsibility (CR) at the functional level of the firm including supply chain strategy. The results of a firm-level survey show that CR internal awareness, and monitoring CR performance are positively related to the supply chain partnership approach, however sharing CR best practices is negatively associated. Furthermore, the impact of CR on firm performance is mediated by the functional behaviour of supply chain partnership formation. Our study provides support for including CR awareness building and monitoring in the development of partnerships but cautions against imposing CR best practices on suppliers.

To maximise their operational efficiency and effectiveness, firms in supply chains have turned to closer collaborative relationships with their suppliers (Szwejczewski et al., 2005). In parallel over the last few decades, consumer pressure, public concern, regulatory forces, industry peer pressures, perceived market advantage, reputation concerns and media interest (Banerjee et al., 2003, Dummett, 2006 and Park-Poaps and Rees, 2010) have heightened firms' appreciation of the importance of corporate (ethical and environmental) responsibility. This has led to the prevalence of corporate responsibility on firms' top management agendas (McWilliams and Siegel, 2001), and recent research suggests that corporate responsibility issues have become an increasingly more significant part of strategy in large and small companies alike (Carlisle and Faulkner, 2004 and Petts et al., 1999). The extant strategy literature identifies three levels of strategy. These are corporate, business and functional (Hofer and Schendel, 1978). A great deal of research considers corporate responsibility at the organisational level and considers its interaction with corporate or business strategy (Laplume et al., 2008). The examination of corporate responsibility and functional strategies is much less prevalent. Strategy at a functional level focuses on the maximisation of resource productivity within the function in question, for example, operations and marketing (Hofer and Schendel, 1978). It is generally assumed that functional strategies are derived from the business level strategy (Fitzsimmons et al., 1992). Purchasing, more recently referred to as supply management, is recognised as one of the core functional strategies of the firm (Virolainen, 1998 and Baier et al., 2008). In this paper we examine the relationship between firms' corporate (ethical and environmental) responsibility attitudes, policies and practices towards suppliers and the supply chain partnership strategy. Corporate responsibility consists of a matrix of strategies, policies and behaviours. What is clear from the corporate responsibility literature is that corporate responsibility is a way of managing relationships with stakeholders (Waddock, 2004). It is a signal to stakeholders that the firm will not betray their interests. As such, corporate responsibility shares some of the central tenets of the partnership relationship approach, notably fair treatment and collaboration. Corporate responsibility is often said to increase trust in, and support for, organisations (McWilliams et al., 2006). It facilitates the development of trusting relationships with key stakeholders based on the principles of distributional, procedural and interactional justice, increasing the likelihood of nuanced information sharing, in turn spurring innovation and enabling the organisation to better deal with environmental change (Harrison et al., 2010). We would therefore expect that firms exhibiting corporate responsibility would also exhibit a tendency towards relationships based on a partnering ethos. That is, we would expect that firms that put into place corporate responsibility practices at the functional level of purchasing and supply management are more likely to be in close partnership with their suppliers than those firms where corporate responsibility practices are less prevalent. To contribute to the development of SCM as a discipline in its own right by explicitly recognising linkages to other disciplines (Vachon and Klassen, 2006) we examine how the assimilation of a supply chain partnership approach is affected by corporate responsibility practices. We attempt to identify the impact of different facets of corporate responsibility on supply chain partnership. With more and more firms recognising the market and economic benefits that can be derived from partnering (Carr and Pearson, 2002), knowing how to move towards and facilitate partnership relationships with suppliers has become a high priority and vital challenge for firms. However, the extant literature on corporate responsibility in the buyer–supplier relationship domain provides only limited insights into how the efforts of firms to make ‘corporate responsibility’ operational affects the relationship between buyer and supplier. It is the contention of this study that increased levels of corporate responsibility internal awareness, corporate responsibility monitoring and corporate responsibility best practice sharing will result in greater levels of supply chain partnerships between a firm and its suppliers. We also assess the impact of corporate responsibility and supply chain partnership formation on firm performance (see Fig. 1). Through these efforts, we attempt to enrich the understanding of how firms' ethical and environmental practices support or otherwise the development of partnerships with suppliers and how these partnerships affect firm performance.

We tested the hypotheses using structural equation modelling (s.e.m.) with a maximum likelihood estimation option and our conceptual model (Fig. 1) as the base model. The model fits the data satisfactorily (χ2(152)=184.041, P<0.001, CMIN/DF=1.688, IFI=0.941, CFI=0.938, RMSEA=0.067). The results are summarised in Table 2.With regard to Hypothesis 1a, Table 2 shows that internal awareness does have a positive effect on the incidence of the supply chain partnership approach, thus providing support for H1a. For Hypothesis 2a, which concerns the effect of monitoring corporate responsibility performance with suppliers/partners, we find that such monitoring is positively related to the incidence of the supply chain partnership approach, thus supporting H2a. Hypothesis 3a pertains to the effects of sharing corporate responsibility best practices with suppliers/partners. The results show that there is a significant effect, however that sharing corporate responsibility best practices is, in fact, negatively related to the incidence of the supply chain partnership approach. This is a very interesting finding that we address in the next section. Based on the limited findings in the extant literature we also hypothesised (H4) that the adoption of a supply chain partnership approach would have a positive impact on firm performance. The results from our sample indicate that this is the case, thus providing support for H4. We also hypothesised that each of our three corporate responsibility dimensions would have a positive impact on firm performance. As Table 2 indicates, this was not the case. Neither corporate responsibility internal awareness, monitoring or best practice sharing had an effect on firm performance, thus providing no support for Hypothesis 1b, Hypothesis 2b and Hypothesis 3b.