Conclusions, limitations and future research
With the growing importance of collaborating with supply chain partners to implement sustainability, this study contributes to the literature by providing new perspectives on the important enablers of SMPs and valuable insights into the effective ways to use SCI in the sustainability management context. In this study, supplier and customer integration were enablers for both intra- and inter-organizational SMPs, whereas internal integration only enhanced intra-organizational SMPs. Intra- and inter-organizational SMPs were not only positively related to all three aspects of sustainability performance (i.e. economic, environmental and social performances), but also functioned complementarily to jointly promote both environmental and social performance. With that in mind, some limitations and issues must be further investigated. First, although we explored the relationship between SCI and SMPs, future empirical investigations are needed to further examine this relationship. For example, the effects of SCI on SMPs may be influenced by various contingency factors. To understand the effectiveness of SCI in implementing SMPs, it would be interesting to explore the roles of these factors in the relationship between SCI and SMPs, for example, supply chain complexity (i.e. supplier complexity, customer complexity and internal complexity), product-level complexity and variety and environmental uncertainties (e.g. demand, supply and technological uncertainties).
