Green Transition Pressures and the Strategic Centrality of Green Supply Chain Management: Evidence from Manufacturing SMEs
Main article
Abstract
Small and medium-sized manufacturers sit at the sharp end of the green transition: they face mounting environmental demands from regulators, customers, and competitors, yet command a fraction of the resources that large firms marshal to respond. This study asks whether, and through what channels, green transition pressures translate into the strategic adoption of green supply chain management (GSCM) among manufacturing SMEs, and whether that adoption pays. Drawing on institutional theory, the natural-resource-based view, and stakeholder theory, we develop a model in which three distinct pressures—regulatory, market-and-customer, and normative-competitive—drive GSCM adoption, which in turn shapes environmental and competitive performance, with firm resource slack acting as a moderator and green innovation as an intervening capability. We test the model on survey data from 486 manufacturing SMEs across four industry clusters, combining confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling, and moderated regression. Three findings stand out. First, all three pressures raise GSCM adoption, but market-and-customer pressure is the strongest single driver, exceeding regulatory pressure by a wide margin—SMEs green their supply chains more to keep buyers than to satisfy inspectors. Second, GSCM adoption is a genuine performance lever rather than a compliance cost: firms in the top adoption quartile report environmental-performance scores 38% higher and competitive-performance scores 22% higher than those in the bottom quartile, with green innovation mediating a substantial share of the competitive effect. Third, resource slack amplifies the returns to adoption, so the environmental payoff of greening is roughly 45% steeper for resource-rich than resource-poor SMEs, revealing an equity concern in transition policy. We contribute an SME-specific account of GSCM's strategic centrality and derive implications for managers sequencing green investments and for policymakers designing support that reaches the resource-constrained firms most exposed to the transition.
