Information Exchange,Innovation Capability And Green Supply Chain Performance

Green supply chain has become the new and most important thing in business arena today,thus attracting many studies by academicians.Consequently to achieve best green supply chain performance there must be effective and reliable information exchange among the supply chain partners,while observing suitable and reliable innovation capability of each other.This is due to the fact that innovation can contribute to the improvement or diminishing of the green supply chain performance.However,the relationship between information exchange and green supply chain performance has unsatisfactory being studied because most of studies have not considered information exchange as individual component impacting overall supply chain integration;instead they have considered it as part of other factors that integrate the supply chain(Gustine et al.,1995;Cooper et al.,1997;Moberg et al.,2002).Also,most of the studies carried out are from the context of developed countries.Therefore,this study considers information exchange in the current perspective of green supply chain,by focusing on its impact as an individual component on the green supply chain performance from the context of developing countries.Consequently,the main aim of this study is based on investigating how information exchange improves green supply chain performance in the Tanzanian fishing industry.The main aim is supported by three research questions named;(i)what are the potential impacts of information exchange on green supply chain performance?(ii)What is the mediating role of innovation capability on the relationship between information exchange and the green supply chain performance?(iii)What factors influence the effectiveness of information exchange towards green supply chain performance? The study is more of quantitative research whereby survey questionnaire was used to collect data form the fishermen,fish collectors as well as dealers,processors and exporters located in Mwanza Region and Dar es salaam region as representative of primary sources of fish supply chains in Tanzania.Data were collected from 300 respondents who were categorized in company supplier sample consisting of 170 respondents and company buyer sample of 130 respondents.The collected data was analyzed basing on their category whereby SMART PLs version 23 was used.However,exploratory factor analysis was engaged to extract the key factors before using structural equation modeling(SEM)to test the hypotheses.The study’s empirical results conclude that information exchange leads to acquisition of perceived information exchange benefits by a company,by its main suppliers and its main buyers which are likely to jointly improve innovation capability that consequently helps in improving green supply chain performance.Therefore,information exchange can improve green supply chain performance through the perceived information exchange benefits obtained by each chain member.Thus,this research makes theoretical and practical contributions.These findings can also be extended in academic perspective whereby researchers can conduct further studies from different context and involve not only main suppliers and buyers but also other green supply chain stakeholders.Lastly,practitioners or managers can apply these findings to their business strategies so as to improve their green supply chain performance through improved innovation capability and effective information exchange.