6.4 Conclusion and limitations
The study concludes that GSCM is an essential enabler of EP in Jordanian manufacturing companies. Additionally, the results demonstrate the important effect of GSCM on export performance. Moreover, this study contributes to the understanding of the importance of an improved EP in helping Jordanian manufacturing companies enhance their export performance. Furthermore, the findings showed that EP mediates the GSCM—export performance relationship in a positive and significant way. This study provides a better understanding of the impact of GSCM on two critical performance dimensions, environmental and export performance, and provides new insights into the theoretical and practical implications of GSCM in the manufacturing sector. Limitations of this study must be recognized. The main limitation of this study is applying the convenience sampling method. Although this method is widely applied in business studies, it may have resulted is some bias and affected the generalizability of the results. Second, the data were collected from a single respondent in each company. Although this method is also widely used in operations and SCM studies, future studies could collect data from multiple respondents in each company to improve the generalizability of the results. Third, the data were collected from different industry types in Jordan due to the small number of companies belonging to one industry type. Future research could focus on one industry type to provide more specific results and implications. Lastly, the current study used four GSCM practices. Future studies could extend to GSCM practices that were not considered in this research such as reverse logistics.
