6. Conclusion
Nowadays, greening supply chains is an essential consideration for companies because stakeholders, such as regulatory bodies and customers are becoming growingly concerned about the nature and environment, thus making GSCM a fruitful area of research. Endeavors have been made to test the influence of environmental practices on business performance since last century (e.g., Bloom and Morton, 1991; Beamon, 1999; Carter et al., 2000; Albertini, 2013), but when concentration is directed to the more detailed relationship between GSCM practices and firm performance, a quantitative review of published literature turns out to be a relatively young and emerging research focus. In our analysis, 54 empirical studies with the first appearance in 2004 are included, and the results of meta-analysis confirm the positive relationship between GSCM practices and firm performance, and that there are several moderators impacting the strength of practice-performance relationship.
First, we find that, the impact of internal environmental management on external environmental management is significantly positive, implying that the successful implementation of external green practices needs the cooperation and coordination from internal green practices. Second, it is discovered that all discussed firm performance are positively influenced by GSCM practices, which can be explained from the resource-based view. And in particular, the influence on environmental performance is the largest, succeeded by operational and economic performance. The finding is not surprising, because GSCM practices are initially designed by firms to improve environmental sustainability. It should be noted that, not all types of GSCM practices have the same level of impact on firm performance. Specifically, for environmental performance, internal environmental management and customer cooperation are found to exert the most evident effects.
