How assessment and cooperation practices influence suppliers’ adoption of sustainable supply chain practices: An inter-organizational learning perspective

A lack of transparency and the relative invisibility of social and environmental issues in supply chains render the implementation of sustainability without the involvement of suppliers difficult. For this, buying companies apply different sustainable supply chain management practices. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether buying companies' assessment and cooperation practices enable suppliers to adopt similar practices and thereby further cascade social sustainability requirements to sub-suppliers. While both practices' effects on suppliers' sustainability performance have been investigated, this question has not yet been adequately addressed. To ensure social sustainability along the entire supply chain, we need a deeper understanding of the relationships between the sustainable supply chain management practices of buyers and suppliers. We respond to calls to further investigate the role of inter-organizational learning in the context of sustainability in supply chains. As the supplier perspective remains under-researched in the literature, we conducted a survey among manufacturing sector suppliers in Germany. Partial least square structural equation modelling was used to test the hypothesized relationships between buying companies' assessment and cooperation practices and suppliers' adoption of sustainable supply chain management practices. Our findings reveal that there is a trickle-down effect of sustainable supply chain practices from buying companies to suppliers, and from suppliers to sub-suppliers. Only cooperation practices prove to be effective for the development of suppliers’ sustainability capabilities, in contrast to assessment practices. Our findings contribute to the literature on sustainable supply chain management by providing a key building block for understanding the effects of assessment and cooperation practices. We are among the first to provide insights on the mechanism of cascading sustainable supply chain management practices in supply chains.