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Stakeholder Pressures, Environmental Practice Adoption and Economic Performance in the German Third-party Logistics Industry—A Contingency Perspective

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Abstract

This study explores how companies adopt environmental practices when they are exposed to stakeholder pressures and how those practices affect economic performance within the German third-party logistics industry. The relationships are tested against a random sample of 192 German third-party logistics providers by using a higher-order partial least squares approach. The study reveals that perceived stakeholder pressures, especially internal, market, and regulatory pressures, strongly influence third-party logistics providers’ environmental practice adoption and that environmental practice adoption improves economic performance. Moreover, by introducing complexity of service offerings as an important firm-related contextual variable, the study advances our knowledge as it highlights that companies with basic service offerings can benefit more from adopting environmental practices than companies with advanced service offerings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Adidas AG Amsterdam, Director Global Distribution Center Landscape, Utrecht, Netherlands

    Steffen Maas

  2. Department of International Management, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Lange Gasse 20, 90403, Nuremberg, Germany

    Tassilo Schuster

  3. Department of Supply Chain Management, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Lange Gasse 20, 90403, Nuremberg, Germany

    Evi Hartmann

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  1. Steffen Maas
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Correspondence to Tassilo Schuster.

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Maas, S., Schuster, T. & Hartmann, E. Stakeholder Pressures, Environmental Practice Adoption and Economic Performance in the German Third-party Logistics Industry—A Contingency Perspective. J Bus Econ 88, 167–201 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11573-017-0872-6

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