Sustainable Supply Chain Learning and Employee Green Creativity: Implications for Disruption Management and Green Competitiveness

Introduction

Supply chains, learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, economic reverberations have ensued supply chain disruptions across industries, with some yet to recover from the shock (Sarkis, 2021) fully. The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic further provide evidence that businesses and their supply chain networks are embedded in the natural environments. Environmental impacts have repercussions for business operations (El Baz & Ruel, 2020; Sarkis, 2021). El Baz and Ruel (2020) suggested that the pandemic significantly impacted supply chains. The authors further categorised these effects into operational and disruption risks. Although past scholars have emphasised the impacts of operational risks in the supply chain context, less emphasis is on disruption risks. This is partly due to their low frequency yet high impacts, high uncertainty and rippling effects across supply chain networks and beyond (El Baz & Ruel, 2020; Hosseini, Ivanov, & Dolgui, 2019; Ivanov, 2020; Sarkis, 2021).

Explaining further, the real social, economic and political disruption from the pandemic has triggered several scholars and practitioners to engage in studies and practices that aim to alleviate the dire impacts faced by firms in the COVID-19 era (Araz, Choi, Olson, & Salman, 2020; Fahimnia, Jabbarzadeh, & Sarkis, 2018; Xu, Zhang, Feng, & Yang, 2020). According to Guan et al. (2020), the pandemic crisis shock on supply chains was profound across global networks affecting the core of demand and supply. These shocks have stirred the call for sustainable and resilient supply chains perceiving that some practitioners and scholars (El Baz & Ruel, 2020; Hosseini et al., 2019; Ivanov, 2020; Sarkis, 2021) are debating if current traditional supply chain strategies and policies can survive the post-COVID-19 era. These debates have guided the relevance of sustainable supply chain learning and green creativity among firms’ employees in this digitised era. Digitisation has improved the access, storage, and processing of significant amounts of data. Yet, creating an supply chain learning based integrated conceptual model for such digitisation processes and data can be crucial for organisations in enhancing agility and adaptability (Yang, Jia, & Xu, 2019). Hence, relying on the extended resource-based view, the authors emphasised that supply chain learning promotes crucial information and data sharing that profoundly shapes employee responsiveness, creativity and overall firm performance. Jia, Gong, and Brown (2019) assertions, also harmonising with Yang et al. (2019), specify that supply chain leadership through supply chain learning promotes sustainable chain management, which also crucially improves employee creativity. These scholars’ assertion indicates that in the quest to improve supply chain resilience and sustainability, supply chain learning and employee green creativity can be critical weapons in achieving desired outcomes. Despite the recognition, only a few studies come close to integrating and assessing the correlations between sustainable supply chain learning and employee green creativity, especially from the COVID-19 perspective.