Realizing the Environmental Benefits of Proactive Environmental Strategy: The Roles of Green Supply Chain Integration and Relational Capability

Abstract

Although the impact of proactive environmental strategies on corporate performance has been extensively discussed in academia, the path of the impact of proactive environmental strategies on environmental performance remains unclear. In this study, we introduce a strategy–structure–performance (SSP) framework to explore the mechanism through which proactive environmental strategies improve environmental performance by utilizing green supply chain integration. Based on the questionnaire survey data of 252 Chinese manufacturing firms, a structural equation model was established to verify our hypothesis. The results show that firms that implement a proactive environmental strategy tend to promote the green integration of suppliers through internal green integration and thus improve their environmental performance. By distinguishing two kinds of activities of green supplier integration (greening the supplier and environmental collaboration with the supplier), we found that environmental collaboration with the supplier can directly promote the environmental performance of manufacturing enterprises, but supplier greening indirectly enhances the environmental performance of enterprises through supplier environmental collaboration. The boundary conditions of the influence of internal green integration on green supplier integration are discussed, and we found that the relationship cability plays a moderating role in the influence of internal green integration on supplier green integration.