1. Introduction
In the wake of the upsurge in environmental inadequacy and degradation of natural resources, environmental sustainability has acquired an increased global importance in recent years [
1]. The post COVID-19 era ascertained the inevitability of the combination and the interaction of resilience, technology, and environmental sustainability [
2]. Today, the world is witnessing various worldwide challenges in coping with the current dynamic market. Sustainable development is one key challenge that has occupied many researchers and policy makers [
3]. Sustainable development now plays a vital role in business survival by enhancing regulatory pressures imposed by stakeholders and existing production practices [
4]. Accordingly, businesses have realized that their economic development requires simultaneous attention to environmental protection [
3], and especially that the consistent deuteration and destruction of ecology and its impact on human health are motivating individuals to consume responsibly and to demand that organizations fulfil environmental responsibilities [
5]. Moreover, government institutions are also obliging organizations to enhance their compliance with the rules and directives governing environmental safeguarding [
6]. Accordingly, organizations are converting their supply chains (SCs) towards more environmentally friendly decisions and moving towards having practices that are oriented towards the enhancement of environmental SC performance [
7].
Organizations worldwide are applying innovative technologies to reduce the burden they are putting on the environment [
8]. Organizations recognize the importance of innovative technologies and comprehend that customer value and their long-term organizational success and, indeed, their survival depends on their ability to integrate new innovations and technology solutions [
9]. Industry 4.0 technologies, such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printers, and BCT, offer immense support to sustainability practices that include reuse, recycling, green procurement, and remanufacturing [
10,
11,
12]. These technologies need to be integrated in the business process in order to gain their full benefits [
13,
14], for they can help to coordinate and align business partner goals [
15], which, in return, enhances the overall supply chain [
16,
17], with a special focus on sustainability [
18,
19].
Environmental fortification is now a prerequisite for achieving sustainable competitive advantage and is an integral part of the preemptive management of companies [
20]. Businesses routinely encounter vital environmental issues, such as ecosystem conservation, waste control, air quality, integrity, and sustainability of resources to stipulate a clean and healthy environment [
21]. Various enterprises have implemented effective solutions to address these issues, such as recycling in the workplace, promoting green communities, forming sustainable committees, and the ongoing new trend of digitalization [
22]. As a result, new solutions incorporating the latest technologies are urgently required to maximize the movement towards environmental sustainability practices within supply chains [
8]. The latest developments of digital transformations in artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, Robotics, Big Data, and BCT have paved the way for smarter, safer, integrated, more transparent, more economic, and more resource efficient processes along the SC [
11].
BCT is recognized by practitioners and academia [
23] as having the capacity to generate a transaction information ledger that is trusted and transparent [
10]. As it presents potent solutions for businesses through efficiently improving their overall business operations [
24,
25], it can be argued that BCT has a special importance for the resiliency and sustainability of the supply chains of the future. BCT accelerates the identification of risk and pressure through collecting data quickly and efficiently, which can enhance transparency and visibility and, eventually, SCR [
26]. In return, resilience permits organizations to take the initiative and to foster contingency plans to cope with volatile occurrences, and, also, to maintain enhanced organizational and environmental performance [
27,
28] that decrease manufacturing costs along with toxic materials and waste [
29]. BCT information handling capability [
10] can also lead to an enhanced customer integration and, eventually, more efficient green information sharing [
30]. Collaborating closely with customers could enable organizations to cope better with the dynamic business environment, which could be achieved through enhancing customer integration in order to gain competitive advantage by accurately meeting customer needs and demands, since through customer integration, the customer is actively involved and can decide when, how, and where to gain access to their product/service [
31]. Because of the benefits of creating close relations with the customers, it can be argued that it can eventually lead to enhanced environmental performance [
32] through increasing customer green information sharing [
33]. In other words, the relationship between BCT, SCR, customer integration, green information sharing, and environmental performance is complex and multifaceted. However, by leveraging these concepts in a strategic and coordinated way, companies can create more resilient, sustainable, and customer-focused supply chains that deliver value to all stakeholders.
According to systems theory, SC is a system that withholds various resources that must be handled properly and efficiently in order to sustain survival in the current dynamic market [
34]. Understanding and application of the systems theory enables managers to take a systems approach in the design and management of SC systems and subsystems [
35]. Accordingly, one uprising subsystem for SCs is BCT [
36], which could be used to make the SC system more efficient and thus enhance the environmental performance of SCs. BCT adoption in the SC is still at a premature stage, its’ applications in distinctive sectors is rising precipitously [
37], as it supports features such as transparency, traceability [
38], and data security, which facilitate environmental sustainability performance [
39]. BCT has the potential to reshape SCs by incorporating sustainable activities with a special focus on environmental protection [
40]. Despite the evident association between BCT, environmental SCP, SCR and customer integration, these topics tend to be analyzed separately, with various authors agreeing that further efforts are necessary to investigate the interactions between the four constructs [
30,
41,
42,
43]. Thus, a gap in the literature exists regarding interlinking BCT, environmental sustainability, resilience, customer integration, and customer green information sharing, and calls for more research [
44]. In addition to the realization that in the current dynamic market, organizations are obliged to become more resilient, integrated, and innovative [
45], the aim of this research is to reconcile BCT adoption, SCR, and customer integration in the context of environmental SCP.
The contribution of this research can be summarized as follows. First, the study addresses how BCT can be adopted to enhance environmental SCP. Second, the research extends the use of DCV theory and KBV theory by identifying SCR, customer integration, and green information sharing as critical dynamic capabilities for achieving a subtle steadiness between BCT adoption and environmental SCP. DCV is extended from previous research, such as [
46], which utilized the DCV to conceptualize BCT as a dynamic capability, but their research explored BCT’s direct influence on the various types of SC integration and its indirect influence on sustainable SCP while focusing only on the Indian automotive industry. Similarly, the KBV theory was utilized by [
47], which applied BCT adoption for improving sustainable organization performance, but this research used SC visibility as a mediating variable and was limited only to the Chinese manufacturing industry. Third, given the deficiency of empirical accounts of how BCT adoption serves as a subsystem that aids in the evolution of environmental SC performance enhancement, the findings of this research provide valuable practical implications for organizations and stakeholders to evaluate their readiness and capabilities for inspiring environmental SCP through BCT adoption.
The research is structured as follows. The theoretical background for the theory and constructs of interest is reviewed in
Section 2, which leads to the development of the hypotheses and research model.
Section 3 is the description of the methodological tools and methods applied to evaluate the proposed model, followed by
Section 4, which is the discussion of the research. Finally, the conclusion and recommendations for further studies are drawn in
Section 6.
5. Research Discussion
This research has focused on the impact of blockchain adoption, SCR, customer integration, and customer green information sharing on environmental SCP, empirically investigating Egyptian organizations. The findings of this research will aid companies that are trying to use their technological capabilities to efficiently cope with increasing pressures to increase sustainable SCP, which has become essential for efficient operations and the survivability of organizations (i.e., members of the chain).
Firstly, the empirical data as demonstrated in
Table 5, depicts that there was a negative direct relationship between BCT adoption and environmental SCP (H1). This contradicts the previous literature, where authors showed that there was a positive impact of BCT adoption on SC environmental performance (e.g., Chittipaka, Kumar [
115]), which empirically tested whether BCT adoption can enhance the level of environmental SC performance. Similarly, Yu, Umar [
64] tested the positive impact of BCT adoption on environment SC performance. However, our results contradicted these studies, and instead proposed that BCT alone will not be able to positively enhance the environmental performance of SCs. This is due to the economic crisis that Egypt is currently experiencing, where the Egyptian market is currently dealing with the economic and political repercussions of the said crisis. As a result, organizations are unfortunately putting off their environmental worries and are finding it difficult to keep up a high standard of green performance as, in times of crises such as the one that Egypt is currently facing, organizations invariably prioritize their financial performance. As a result, businesses began implementing and investing in technologies such as BCT as a means of survival in the Egyptian market, with its current political and economic instability. Thus, the proposed framework of the study suggests that the adoption of BCT could have positive impacts when leveraging the proposed concepts of BCT, SCR, customer integration, green information sharing, and the environment in a strategic and coordinated way, and that companies can create more resilient, sustainable, and customer-focused supply chains that deliver value to all stakeholders. Hence, we advocated that from a DCV, by utilizing the adoption of BCT through various mediating variables, BCT could have the potential to aid organizations to enhance their environment performance.
Secondly, the significant positive relationship between BCT adoption and environmental SCP mediated by SCR (H2) addresses the importance of SCR enabled by BCT to enhance the environmental SCP [
65]. Although the findings of the current study depicts that BCT alone cannot enhance the performance of environmental SCs, it is evidently critical to the profitability and survival of any company to have a resilient SC [
63]. This is especially true in a developing country such as Egypt, which is undergoing cultural changes towards the implementation of the latest technologies, as people recognize that technology adoption has become a primary source of economic development. Accordingly, this research sheds light on the potential of BCT-enabled SCR and its relevance to the overall performance of environmental SCs. As previously mentioned, BCT can be used to minimize vulnerabilities along the SC and act as a backbone to SCR through enabling real-time visibility, which can support decision making and support smooth functioning in the event of disruptions [
87].
Hence, establishing SCR enabled by BCT could aid organizations to properly respond to the ongoing changes occurring in the market. Thus, BCT adoption in SCR could strengthen the organizations’ competencies and enhance environmental SCP. This result is similar to previous research, where the impact of BCT adoption on SCR was empirically tested by [
87], and the impact of SCR on environmental performance was empirically tested by [
29]. However, this study measures the interrelationships of the three constructs combined, which were empirically found to be highly constructive jointly, and this is reflected as a contribution to the current knowledge of the literature, especially in emerging markets such as Egypt that lack empirical testing of such research models [
89]. Therefore, organizations should adopt BCT to improve SCR in order to better enhance SC environmental performance.
Finally, the sequential mediator role of both customer integration and customer green information sharing between BCT adoption and environmental SCP (H3) was empirically supported through our results. That is, customer integration and customer green information sharing provide an additional benefit in acquiring the highest feasible efficiency of BCT adoption on environmental SCP. This result is in line with [
116], which found a significant positive impact between customer integration and green customer information sharing on environmental SCP. However, this research is expected to deepen the understandings of BCT adoption and environmental SCP through the proposed framework, which was not conducted previously in the same context. Thus, organizations should benefit from the proposed framework to adopt BCT in order to enhance customer integration, which sequentially enhances customer green information sharing that ultimately leads to the enhancement of SC environmental performance. This empirically supports the KBV and DCV theories regarding using knowledge/information wisely in order to be more responsive to the market change towards sustainability, thereby enhancing the environmental SCP.
According to the previous discussion, it was concluded that Egyptian organizations in the current dynamic market should focus on enhancing their SCR, customer integration, and green customer information sharing through the adoption of technologies such as BCT, which eventually lead to the enhancement of their SC environmental performance. Additionally, companies should focus on enhancing their capabilities through BCT as the adoption of such technology may furthermore lead to the development of significant capabilities, increasing sustainable performance and enabling the development of sustainable strategies that can enhance the position of companies in the market.
6. Conclusions
The primary objective of this study was to empirically investigate the impact of BCT adoption on SCR and customer integration in the context of environmental SCP for both manufacturing and service sectors in the Egyptian market, as improved environmental performance can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. By adopting sustainable practices and technologies, companies can demonstrate their commitment to environmental responsibility and differentiate themselves from competitors. This can help to build customer trust and strengthen brand reputation.
Based on the review of the literature and previous studies, the research model was generated to conceptualize the theoretical concepts and discover the research gap as well as to extend the theories of KBV and DCV through empirical evidence. In support of the originality of the study to determine the relationship between BCT adoption, SCR and customer integration, and environmental SCP, the results obtained confirmed the positive and significant relationship between these things. Therefore, this research sheds light on unexplored areas regarding the adoption of BCT in Egypt. In addition, the proposed framework may serve as a valuable tool to be used by decision makers and stakeholders to upgrade the environmental performance of their SCs, as it is currently mandatory to be sustainable due to the deterioration of business conditions. Hence, this research could potentially be applied to developing nations with a similar macro economical context to the Egyptian market, although nations with different macro economical context must take into consideration their economic, political, and cultural differences in order to acquire the benefits of the proposed framework.
Accordingly, the results of this research obtain potential managerial and theoretical implications. From a managerial lens, the proposed model of the study showed that BCT alone cannot benefit the members of a SC system to manage their resources properly to enhance environmental SCP. However, the SC members must focus on adopting BCT to enhance SC resilience, manage customer integration and green information sharing to achieve environmental SCP. Even though, the relationship between these concepts is complex and multi-faceted. However, by adopting a holistic approach that integrates these concepts, organizations can create more resilient, sustainable, and customer-focused supply chains that deliver value to all stakeholders. On the contrary, although care was taken to approach respondents familiar with the BCT and environmental performance concepts, the level of understanding was expected to vary, which reflects the benefits of BCT adoption and environmental performance.
Furthermore, this study implies that organizations should exert more effort to enhance their understanding of this relationship. In terms of a theoretical approach, this research has revealed to the SCM community the potentially beneficial relationship that could be used as a tool to cope with the dynamic business environment between BCT adoption and environmental SCP when it is mediated by SCR, customer integration, and green customer information sharing. This emphasizes the need for a more impactful role and more robust empirical studies that can help to tackle the new challenges of the current digital era. Thus, this research opens up a new research avenue for scholars and practitioners interested in improving the understanding of the relationship between BCT and environmental SCP in other areas and contexts. Moreover, the results of this study could be generalized by considering various organizations not only in Egypt but also in other emerging and developing countries, such as China, India, etc. Lastly, we suggest that further studies should explore alternative qualitative methods, such as conducting interviews and focus groups where the results may contribute to the triangulation, provide further support, and shed light on the findings of the SEM model.