How fairness perceptions, embeddedness, and knowledge sharing drive green innovation in sustainable supply chains: An equity theory and network perspective to achieve sustainable development goals

The response to increasingly serious environmental issues is no longer limited to companies but is an important issue among supply chains. Green innovation is an essential segment of gaining a competitive advantage in the sustainable supply chain to achieve sustainable development goals. However, boosting sustainable supply chain development through green innovation is a complex network activity in which a large number of partners are embedded, and the need exists to transfer or share knowledge in an equal and reasonable exchange process. This study proposes a novel framework to explore perceptions of fairness that include procedural and distributive approaches as antecedents. We also examine embeddedness, knowledge sharing, and green innovation in the sustainable supply chain in terms of equity theory and a network scenario. This study contributes to the sustainable development goals (SDG's) such as Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8); Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (SDG 9); Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12) and Climate Action (SDG 13). Useable sets of data were collected and used to test our theoretical hypotheses by surveying 225 firms in China's manufacturing supply chain sectors. The research model is analysed by the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) methodology. The empirical findings reveal that perceived fairness constructs that consist of procedural and distributive fairness have a highly positive linkage with embeddedness, while those that do not present significant effects on knowledge sharing directly. Moreover, both embeddedness and knowledge sharing demonstrate significant partial mediating impact on green innovation in the sustainable supply chain; knowledge sharing especially plays a key role in achieving green innovation. This study finds that firm size as a control variable presents a positive effect on green innovation. Finally, conclusions and practical implications are given. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.