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Article

Determinants of an Environmentally Sustainable Model for Competitiveness

by
K. Noorliza
Operations Management, School of Management, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang 11800, Malaysia
Sustainability 2023, 15(2), 1444; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15021444
Submission received: 28 October 2022 / Revised: 15 December 2022 / Accepted: 6 January 2023 / Published: 12 January 2023
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Abstract

:
Environmental practices in the logistics industry play a significant role in environmental sustainability, but how logistics professionals and logistics service providers (LSPs) engage with environmental practices is inexplicable. This paper explores the human–environment connection within the LSPs context to develop an environmentally sustainable model through environmental leadership that encourages the organizational structure and green practices to obtain sustained performance and competitiveness. The paper reviews LSP articles extracted from the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. The results provide an environmentally sustainable model for LSPs and managers, stimulating themselves from within to green actions and sustainability to enhance their reputation and image, competitiveness, environmental preservation, human well-being, and service differentiation and innovation. The findings also reveal that the intrinsic attributes of leaders are more conducive to fostering the organizational design of environmental practices. The determinants of environmental intrinsic leadership values are emotional, biospheric (i.e., valuing the environment), altruistic (i.e., respecting the welfare and well-being of other human beings), egoistic (i.e., valuing personal resources), and hedonic values (i.e., loving pleasure and comfort) within leaders. The khalifa for 6P sustainability performance effectively is as follows: green practice, profit, planet, people, and product, process/service innovation. This study provides theoretical and practical implications for the logistics industry.

1. Introduction

Environmental practices in the logistics industry have been a significant phenomenon since the early 1990s, albeit slow in actual settings locally and internationally. The logistics industry is responsible for ecological risk and has become the second largest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions from freight transport vehicles and vessels [1]. The evidence shows that 25% of global CO2 emissions come from the logistics sector; freight transport contributes to GHG and CO2 by 15% and 23%. Logistics firms have shown their commitment to environmental practices by publishing their sustainability reports: corporate social responsibility (CSR) and code of conduct [2]. Therefore, green practices and environmental performance are critical for the logistics industry to gain superb environmental performance, which fosters sustained competitiveness and profit and benefits human health [3,4,5]. By focusing on green practices, the planet, profit, processes, products/services, and people can tackle global sustainable development challenges and sustainable development goals (SDG) [6].
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused tremendous demand for logistics service providers (LSPs). This rapid growth of the logistics sector significantly leads to the economy’s growth, simultaneously negatively impacting environmental degradation [7]. These phenomena propose quickening environmental practices by embracing logistics players through firm-specific organizational design to promote cleaner logistics operations. However, few logistics service providers (LSPs) are environmentally responsive; many resists and only respond to regulatory mandates [8,9]. Some researchers comment that several unsuccessful cases are due to a high initial cost, lack of stringent regulations, and unconvinced environmental benefits payoffs. Practically, LSPs are considerably confronting increasing challenges and obstacles in implementing sustainable logistics practices and meeting environmental rules and policies [7,9]. Therefore, LSPs and logisticians seek to understand how to reach a robust, sustainable model that aligns with their vibrant and indefinite environment.
This research finds four substantial knowledge gaps in the environmental study of the logistics industry. First, LSPs have faced competitive pressures, challenges, and obstacles in transforming themselves into green; either they are unenthusiastic to endorse the call of the environment/earth or are involved in unethical conduct [7]. Second, the logistics industry is not prioritizing environmental practices or external factors’ pressures; only some LSPs implement environmental practices despite no mandatory forces [8,9]. Third, there is a lack of knowledge and empirical research on how LSPs deal with environmental practices due to many scholars centering green on manufacturing or supply chains [10,11,12] deserting logistics. Finally, despite humans causing environmental degradation, past studies have forgotten the green human capital, the role of managers, and professional logistics in environmental knowledge and the managerial environment. Therefore, theoretical and practical mechanisms involving the human–environment conversion energizing organizational design of environmental practices and resilience logistics are meager [13].
Humankind’s attributes to nature could be a promoter or inhibitor of disaster in the world [6], but there is no research on how human–environment connections foster sustainability performance [3,4,13]. That considerably overlooks theories to defend how LSPs can achieve and maximize their positive impacts on environmental improvement, competitiveness, human well-being, and service innovation [10,11,12]. A lack of understanding of how managers care for and respect the environment is due to the absence of an environmental leadership sustainability model. One will appreciate the benefits of wisdom in environmental care if one can see the world from their noble heart. Such environmental behavior has high confidence or tendency to lead and perform sustainable practices.
This environmentally responsible behavior shows evidence of environmental leadership toward balancing human–environment harmony for future sustainable growth [6]. This green behavior of organizational citizenship for environmental concerns is a function of green human capital. However, the intelligence of these conversion progressions is abstruse. The study on the association between human development and environmental performance indexes persists hesitant in determining China’s sustainable growth [3,4] and found that a green innovation in the hotel industry is enriched by green human resources amidst human capital and environmental knowledge and will be more robust with managerial ecological involvements.
Despite many ecological studies, this current study differs from previous research on how LSPs implement green practices or carbon footprints from a scientific perspective. This study believes that a manager’s or logistician’s attributes embedded intrinsic environmental leadership that stimulates, promotes, or facilitates environmental practices through an organizational design comprising mission and vision, structure and formal systems, processes and culture, competitive strategies, and technical competency to achieve sustainable development in uncertain situations. Thus, this study contributes advanced knowledge in complex intrinsic leadership values that leaders build an agile, resilient, and anti-fragile organization to deal with vibrant uncertainty [14,15]. Naturally, life deals with uncertainty; thus, leaders must activate employees, stimulate innovation, and establish a solid connection to achieve the corporate goal [14,15]. Consequently, this study explores the human–environment connections that reduce the environmental impact of logistics activities and make logistics more environmentally sustainable, shaping green practices and enactment to boost sustainability performance. In order to better understand, the paper analyzes LSP articles to answer the following questions:
  • How do LSPs implement environmental practices?
  • How do human–environment connections foster sustainability performance?
Research questions drive a feasible understanding to justify the construction between green practices and organizational designs by examining a wide range of LSPs’ responsiveness in dealing with a green implementation.
The study contributes to a novel framework of sustainable performance by reviewing and analyzing past research. It acknowledges that sustainable performance is more effective through leadership stimulating organizational design to speed up environmental implementation. Further, the paper advances knowledge concerning environmental intrinsic leadership values, organizational design dimensions to green implementation, and sustainability performances. Environmental intrinsic leadership values within leaders that make LSPs structure and design their organizations to implement green practices to foster sustainable performance.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. After the methodology section, it reviews the rereview literature on the environmental studies of LSPs and their gaps. The later section describes the results, followed by a discussion on the overall results and theoretical and practical implications. The last section provides the conclusion, limitations, and recommendations.

2. Methodology

By investigating environmental studies of LSPs, the study provides an overview of knowledge and research that guides the researcher to establish gaps and a conceptual research model. The study unit analysis is the logistics industry represented by papers or articles observing logistics service providers, third-party logistics, and logistics service (exclusion: logistics and supply chain, logistics functions, or logistics users). Once identifying such LSPs articles, papers examining environmental and sustainability practices are selected. In brief, this research extracts relevant reports concerning environmental studies in LSPs to address the following:
  • How do LSPs implement environmental practices?
  • How do human–environment connections foster sustainability performance?
The study uses a systematic literature review (SLR) approach to search available materials in SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. Commonly researchers use large SCOPUS and Web of Science databases because they are more reliable journal indexes. SLR helps this study to search data from 2006 onwards by using keywords. Green, environmental, sustainability, and carbon footprint are different names frequently mentioned interchangeably in sustainable studies. The keywords and strings used for the analysis are (e.g., (“Logistics service provider” OR “Third-party logistics” OR “Logistics service”) AND (“green” OR “environmental” OR “sustainability” OR “carbon footprint” OR “CO2 emission”)) for article title, abstract and keywords in the papers.
The large databases SCOPUS and ISI Web of Science were selected because they are the world’s best scientific citation search engines and are frequently used as academic library research tools [16]. This research limits the search to two extensive databases because journal indexing helps maintain ethics and quality in publication and increases a paper’s visibility, validity, availability, and readership. The Scopus database offers the existing literature published after 1995 [17], while the Web of Science is the world’s most trusted publisher [16].
This research limits SLR searches to only the formal literature (excluding books and research reports), English written using the database Scopus (www.scopus.com, Accessed on 31 December 2019), and structured keywords and ISI Web of Science (www.webofscience.com, Accessed on 31 December 2019) for improving the reliability of the data collections [18]. The study selected specific databases within certain years to secure the validity of the data.
The SLR search has gathered 447 articles from both databases: 290 from the Scopus database and 157 from the ISI Web of Science. Then, 316 potential LSP articles appeared by eliminating 131 replication papers in both databases during the screening stage. The eligibility stage has excluded another 204 LSP articles because they did not concentrate on environmental practices (exclude if LSP’s articles are on the factor of green adoption/implementation). The study has retained 112 LSP articles for analysis (Figure 1). The investigation later excluded articles with little debate on the study phenomenon but concentrated more on relevant articles.

2.1. Paper Overview

Review observations find that the 112 LSP papers’ profiles are sufficient to be extracted and reveal essential points to discuss and understand in this study. This research extracted relevant 112 LSP papers in 2019, reasoning data that end this year. The number of publications per year highlights more than ten papers published since 2015 compared to one published in 2006. Only six papers were published between 2006 and 2010, forty-one (41) between 2011 and 2015, and sixty-five (65) during the years 2016–2019 (Figure 2). This demonstrates a drastically increasing trend in the number of publications in the last decade, stating that more than 90% of the articles were published. This perhaps explains the increasing consciousness and interest among researchers and practitioners in environmentalism in LSPs. Most published more than four papers are “Sustainability” followed by “Journal of Cleaner Production and International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management” journal (Figure 3).
The majority of researchers used the model in their methodology (53 papers), followed by case studies (31 articles), surveys (19 articles), and reviews (9 articles) (Figure 4). The modeling trend has increased considerably in the last five years, whereas the number of case studies and survey-based research reflects a less variant pattern. Most published papers, mainly are Asia, followed by Europe, no specific country (none), worldwide, America, and Africa. However, Asia and European countries have publications on the environmental studies of LSPs consistently. Although Asia was the first to publish, this recently increased significantly. Moreover, European countries have considerably increased their interest in the topic from 2012 onwards (Figure 5).

2.2. Past Review Papers

The content analysis of articles shows past review papers on environmental sustainability in logistics (Table 1). Nevertheless, most reviews have little understanding of how managers and LSPs design their organizations to implement green practices to stimulate firms’ performance, hence failing to understand the mechanism of sustainable implementation and outcomes of LSPs’ views. For instance, environmental past studies focus on factors influencing the green initiative’s adoption and customer perspective on sustainable supply chain ICTs supporting green initiatives [11], and not on the logistics industry but the logistics of service and manufacturing industries [19] hence unable to generalize for the logistics industry. Moreover, other scholars seek sustainability initiatives, reasons for adoption, benefits achieved following adoption, critical issues and barriers to adoption, and the evaluation and measurement of environmental initiatives [20]; environmental practices and intermodal transport in transport mode decisions within the EU [10]; and the critical dimensions of green matters in transportation and logistics service companies, i.e., influencing factors, green actions, and the impact on performance, information and communication technology tools supporting the green measures, energy efficiency in road freight transport and shipper’s perspective and collaboration [12].

3. Results

3.1. Implementation of Environmental Practices by LSPs

Overall, LSP environmental practices evolve from transportation planning, vehicle utilization, and warehousing; packaging; internal management; training and education; renewable energy and external collaboration; environmental measurement and assessment; environmental quality control; and modal shift to innovative sustainable practices. Such practices involve green-based logistics such as vehicle use, transport modes, energy efficiency, recycling–packaging or reverse logistics and warehouse, a green-based organization such as top management support and commitment, environmental training, and education. The green-based external environment also affects all stakeholders, such as the supply chain initiatives being collaborative or contracting with suppliers and green supply chain practices. Green-based technology and innovation, such as renewable energy, modal shift, or innovative sustainable practices, are crucial for LSPs’ future competitiveness.
Logistics scholars and practitioners have attention to environmental preservation over the decades [23]. The logistics industry must conserve limited resources and reduce environmental destruction, contributing positively to resource optimization [24]. The logistics literature exposes the empirical evidence of the positive relationship between green practices and operational efficiency, environmental, economic, financial, and social performance, and the insignificant effects of these correlations [25,26,27]. Other scholars indicate that financial [28,29], customer [28], technology and government [30], and regulatory [29] are the most significant barriers to environmental practices implementation.
Based on comprehensive reviews, the study performed cross-content analysis to search for environmental practices implementation in LSPs (Table 2). Given various approaches, this current study explored how LSPs deal with environmental practice implementation by categorizing environmental practices into LSPs’ organizational design: organization’s mission and vision, structure and formal systems, organizational processes and culture, competitive strategies, and technology competency. The study converts such organizational design as the following:
-
Mission and vision—the extent of a firm vision and mission for sustainability;
-
Structure and formal system—the extent of legal efforts toward environmental sustainability;
-
Organizational culture and proses—the extent of culture, knowledge, and awareness or education and training about ethical and environmental operations;
-
Competitive strategies—the extent of environmental capabilities, systems, or practices as sources of competitive advantage;
-
Technology competencies—the extent of advanced or innovative tools, green technologies, and logistics innovation focused on environmental sustainability to handle environmental issues, more significant freight volumes, speed the time taken to deliver, and lower the delivery cost.
The observations included in the study exhibited a wide range of LSPs’ responsiveness in dealing with the green implementation that can categorize into the emergence theme of organizational design. Many environmental practices fall into the green-related technology factor. The technology capability or “core competence” is essential to support the environmentally conscious competitive strategy and enhance the environmentally sustainable logistics industry. Technological competence is needed, such as transportation technology, energy-efficient technologies and IT, accessories, and green software for warehousing [7,31,42,52,53]. Sustainability logistics scholars realize the impact of technology capability on sustainability performance [39]. Such green technology-related factors implement by most LSPs, such as vehicle use (e.g., reducing empty running, changing vehicle specifications), transport modes, and intermodality (e.g., greater use of intermodality and low energy transport modes).
Furthermore, the logistics literature reports a number of studies concerning environmental practices in the structure and formal system of an organization that addresses LSP’s official efforts toward environmental sustainability [34,35,36,37,38]. For instance, an organization’s structure and formal system classify into the administrative structure by appointing staff members to monitor environmental performance and create direct ties with top management, the green management team for environmental practices, the monitoring and evaluating environmental performance, the information system, and standardization.
The reviews also acknowledge environmental sustainability adoption, strategies, or practices as sources of competitive advantage in logistics that enable LSPs to obtain performance outcomes. Logistics scholars believe many logistics service providers embrace green practices to secure instant benefits rather than a sustainable development goal [11]. Intermodality, inter-organizational environmental practices or green activities, and environmental cooperation are crucial for ultimate profit and cost reduction [52,54,55].
The logistics literature comments that organization process and culture promote LSP environmental practices such as providing knowledge and awareness, training, and education about ethical and clean operations and resource optimization [7,32,37,40,41,42,43,55]. A small study states that LSPs included environmental practices in their vision and mission statement [31,32]. However, [33] report that some German LSPs incorporated environmental principles into their mission statement, embedding green logistics principles into the company strategy and operations.
To date, no articles address the mechanism of sustainable performance for environmental practices or responsiveness, thereby incorporating innovative environmental strategies or practices into the nature of organizational designs. Unlike the Deutsche Post DHL, almost no current study mentions a firm commitment to a vision and mission for environmental sustainability. In reality, an environmentally conscious mission and vision should not merely be a generic statement that reflects the organizational values, beliefs, norms, and activities. El Baz and Laguir [7] indicate that an environmentally conscious corporate mission and vision are necessary, strengthening the environmental practices for all dimensions of organizational design. However, instead of designing environmental practices to direct vision, mission statement, or corporate strategy priority, some scholars link environmental responsiveness to cost efficiency and performance [11,12,31]. Incorporating environmental practices into the mission and vision of LSP leads to cost efficiency and green supply chain practice adoption among 3LSPs [7,31,32].
The above reviews show that not all LSPs implement environmental practices through a strategic organizational design structure. First, previous studies show that LSPs’ environmental practices appear substantially different in implementing ecological procedures. Several studies highlight that competitive strategies prioritize intermodality, inter-organizational structure, and formal systems; priorities mainly involve environmentally conscious performance measurement, reward mechanism, and the information system. Others mention organizational processes and culture, environmentally conscious problem-solving and decision-making processes, and resource conservation become priorities. Other studies view organizations’ core competencies, environment-conscious vehicle technologies, and environment-conscious warehouse technologies as a priority. Unfortunately, no specific research is reported, particularly on the dimension of organizational mission and vision, indicating that corporate mission and vision are still a comparatively overlooked area of green organization design of LSPs. The significant gap in the reviews is the absence of a sustainable performance model caused by different leaders’ values, environmental beliefs, and behaviors stimulating organizational design structure to enhance other multi-dimension performances through different ecological practices.

3.2. Human–Environment Connection

The review observations rationalize converting LSPs’ organizational design to environmental practices. Still, the nature of humans towards the environment is the mastermind executing those green operations and activities, but how LSPs’ or managers’ ecological values, beliefs systems, and behaviors influence acting more pro-environmentally is a lack of knowledge and research [7,56]. This study theorizes that humankind’s attributes to nature could be an inducer or inhibitor of disaster in the world [6]. Therefore, a human–environment relationship is vital for future sustainable development, particularly in the fifth industrial revolution (5.0 IR), because much of the environmental degradation is due to people’s ignorance [6]. Accordingly, the United Nations Agenda 2030 under Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has integrated humans and the environment with responsibility and accountability [57]. Undeniably, top management is the most crucial success factor, responsible for strategic decisions on environmental implementation, and leaders, khalifas, or managers play a significant role in implementing green practices. The upper echelon theory [58] explains that the values and cognition of top management influence organizational outcomes. However, the studies on environmental intrinsic leadership values are indefinite on whether the different values of innate leadership can boost various environmental performances.
Intrinsic leadership is the leaders’ value or belief system inspiring them to succeed from the inside. It is essential to catalyze and sustain changes, heighten job performance and accomplish strong organizational performance [15]. The intrinsic values within leadership are embedded within the intelligence and innovation of knowledge resources [14,59], empowering human civilization, the nation in the future, a dynamic and new competitive environment, and environmental preservation. Therefore, environmental intrinsic leadership values within leaders make LSPs structure and design their organizations to implement green practices to promote sustainable performance. This study views dimensions of environmental intrinsic leadership values: emotional, biospheric (i.e., valuing the environment), al-truistic (i.e., respecting the welfare and well-being of other human beings), egoistic (i.e., loving personal resources), and hedonic values (i.e., valuing pleasure and comfort) predict corporate fundamental thinking or managers’ environmental attributes toward the natural environment [8,59].

3.3. An Environmentally Sustainable Model

Based on review observations, the study provides a framework for sustainable performance (Figure 6). The environmental strategic management theory [8,33,37] explains how LSPs can maximize their positive impacts on the natural environment, competitiveness, human well-being, and service innovation. First, environmental practices should translate into the corporate mission and vision and become the LSP’s priority. Second, the greening organization is the source of competitive strategies fostering cost-saving, efficiency, reputation effect, and corporate goodwill. Third, organizational structure and formal systems need to adapt and align with the emergence of environmental logistics or the greening organization involving the evaluation of environmental performance, measurement, and reward system. The resource allocations and information systems need to evolve according to dynamic and complex environmentalism. Fourth, the greening organization also requires an organizational culture and processes to materialize problem-solving and decision-making processes informally by integrating environmental practices into the day-to-day operations and decisions. Finally, the greening organization requires core competencies and technological competence to enhance the innovation or greening capability of LSPs, such as vehicle technology for transport and energy-efficient technologies for warehousing.
Value–belief–norm (VBN) theory explains these relationships between normative factors and environmental attitudes and behavior [59]. Firms use cleaner operations or services from their intrinsic environmental leadership values to design organizational structures for environmental implementation [57]. The study integrates VBN, upper echelon, strategic management, and natural resource-based view (NRBV) theory to develop further a sustainable performance model for ecological sustainability and competitiveness (Figure 6). It hypothesizes that managers’ intrinsic environmental leadership values influence LSPs to structure green organizational design, stimulating more positive environmental practices affecting reputation and image, competitiveness, environmental preservation, human well-being, and service differentiation and innovation. Managers’ intrinsic environmental leadership values determine fully green implementation towards the natural environment and subsequently enhance sustainability performance in the long term [57]. This hybrid model endorses that environmental intrinsic leadership value leads to green intentions, actions, decisions, adoptions, and achievements through specific organizational designs of environmental practices that contribute more to the 6P sustainability principles: green practice, profit, planet, people, process, and product/service [8].
Furthermore, NRBV theory views cleaner production as engendering environmental practices to determine environmental performance; successively, firms’ competitiveness is due to cost-efficiency and energy-saving [8,60]. Despite these, the VBN theory emphasizes the antecedents of structuring organizational design from within managers’ environmental intrinsic leadership values that are more conducive to predicting the ecological preservation intention [59]. The empirical finding shows that more than half of values and beliefs (nearly 60%) are built within personal norms [61], suggesting that VBN theory determines strong feelings of environmental intrinsic leadership values. Those who do not act on these values tend to have little moral obligation to environmental to organizational design structure and green implementation.

4. Discussions and Implications

The logistics industry will continue to deal with challenges, uncertainty, and disruption; thus, LSPs and managers need a robust integrative sustainable model for sustained competitiveness and growth. Remarkably, the study develops LSP’s sustainable performance model by integrating environmental leadership complexity into the organizational design to implement ecological practices.
This paper acknowledges the increasing trend in the number of publications over the last decade, indicating the growing consciousness and interest among researchers and practitioners in environmental logistics among LSPs. The interest in environmental logistics research drastically increased in 2012, becoming a more critical issue in the minds of LSPs. The review also indicates the interest of researchers, most recently from different countries, particularly Asia and Europe, published in various journals. The standard methodology used is models followed by case studies and surveys.
In particular, the logistics literature explicitly reveals that some LSPs are environmentally responsive, stating LSPs’ attention to protecting the natural environment and enhancing sustainable/green logistics practices. The results show essential insights into greening LSPs. First, the study provides knowledge underpinnings with innovative and proactive environmental strategies amongst LSPs. This indicates LSPs’ attempts and progress in protecting the environment, most recently and more seriously, which reflect the sustainable and moral/ethical responsibility of LPSs in the greening organization, the preservation of the natural environment, and stakeholders. The reviews display that LSPs’ attitudes, concerns, commitments, obligations, beliefs, or values toward environmentalism are deepened [62,63].
Second, the review presents LSPs’ sustainable practices, demonstrating their commitments to the greening organization rather than environmental strategy in theory or organizational change (external or internal pressures). Green organizational structure and sustainability reports show firms’ environmental practices and performance. Despite the rise over decades of environmental stresses, only a few studies mention LSPs’ engagement in the significant transformation towards environmentally sustainable strategies [37]. The results demonstrate fragmented approaches to sustainable concerns, the imperfection concept and strategy for the greening organization, and green organizational designs.
Third, the study validates the environmental practices of LSPs incorporating into five dimensions of organizational design structure: i.e., (a) competitive strategies; (b) structure and formal systems; (c) organizational processes and culture; (d) technology’s core competencies; and (e) organization’s mission and vision. The findings strengthen some understanding of the most severe and recent practices of LSPs dealing with or responsive to environmentalism through these emergent dimensions of organizational design that have never been revealed before. Hence, they are novel contributions.
The results also indicate the priority of focusing on organizational design dimensions. Competitive strategies prefer intermodality, inter-organizational, structure, and formal systems; priorities mainly involve environmentally conscious performance measurement, reward mechanisms, and the information system. Moreover, organizational processes, culture, environmentally conscious problem-solving and decision-making, and resource conservation become priorities. On the other hand, organizations’ core competencies are environmentally conscious vehicle and warehouse technologies. Unfortunately, no specific research is reported, particularly on the dimension of organizational mission and vision, indicating that corporate mission and vision are still a comparatively overlooked area of green organization design of LSPs.
Finally, the new sustainable model for LSP’s environmental practices and competitiveness is the most novel contribution. The model endorses LSPs’ environmental intrinsic leadership value to green intentions, actions, decisions, adoptions, and achievements through specific organizational designs to obtain the 6P sustainability principles effectively (practices, profit, planet, people, process, and product/service [8] and further, extend upper echelon, VBN, strategic management, and NRBV theory to demonstrate how LSPs can maximize their positive impacts on natural environmental, competitiveness, human well-being, and service innovation by capitalizing cleaner logistics operations.
This study theorizes that humankind’s attributes to nature could be an inducer or inhibitor of disaster in the world [6]. Therefore, a human–environment relationship is vital for future sustainable development, particularly in the fifth industrial revolution (5.0 IR), because much of the environmental degradation is due to people’s ignorance [6]. Accordingly, the United Nations Agenda 2030 under Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has integrated humans and the environment with responsibility and accountability [57]. Undeniably, top management is the most crucial success factor, responsible for strategic decisions on environmental implementation, and leaders, khalifas, or managers play a significant role in implementing green practices. The upper echelon theory [58] explains values and cognition of top management influence organizational outcomes. However, the studies on environmental intrinsic leadership values are indefinite on whether the different values of innate leadership can boost various environmental performances.

4.1. Theoretical Implications

The novel contribution is an environmentally sustainable model for competitiveness through intrinsic environmental leadership and organizational design of environmental practices inspired by [6]; humankind’s attributes to nature could be an inducer or inhibitor of disaster in the world. Hence, the green behavior of human capital of logisticians is more effective for developing logistics’ green innovation. Further, this study constructs environmental leadership intrinsic values obsessed with emotional, biospheric (i.e., valuing the environment), altruistic (i.e., respecting the welfare and well-being of other human beings), egoistic (i.e., valuing personal resources), and hedonic values (i.e., valuing pleasure and comfort) as corporate fundamental thinking or managers’ environmental attributes toward the natural environment.
This paper also contributes to the theory of VBN, upper echelon, strategic management, and NRBV. The conversion of intrinsic environmental leadership values to environmental attitudes and intentions to preserve the natural environment demonstrates human–environment connections [6,14]. It advances the value–belief–norm (VBN) theory [59]. The results reveal that managers’ intrinsic environmental leadership values, stimulating more effective cleaner operations to take care of ecological degradation, are the most crucial success factor of LSP responsible for strategic decisions to environmental implementation, but their values and cognitive influence organizational outcomes [58].
Although theory argues that organizational design is associated with implementing environmental strategies, the exact conversion endures ambiguity. Many studies investigate areas of excellence in reducing environmental impact and gaining logistics performance and competitiveness. Nevertheless, this study looks for consistency of environmental practices across organizational design dimensions comprising the organization’s mission and vision, structure, formal systems, administrative processes, culture, competitive strategies, and technology competency.
The reviews suggest that environmental practices integrated into organizational design are highly relevant and emerge the concept of sustainable practices for maximizing the benefits for people, planet, profit, process, and product/service [6,8,14,27]. LSPs gain positive competitiveness, performance, reputation effects, and corporate goodwill from their innovative environmental strategies [8,36,45]. Thus, this study contributes to understanding strategic management and NRBV theory to explain how LSPs can maximize their positive impacts on the natural environment, competitiveness, human well-being, and service innovation.
The study contributes to the research and literature domain of competitiveness and environment by examining LSPs’ environmental strategic management and practices with green or sustainable strategies, objectives, and actions for sustainable logistics to ascertain cost-saving, operational efficiency, and service differentiation from their competitors. Thus far, the existing green corporate design of LSPs is prolonged progress in protecting the natural environment. Thus, the paper underpins those LSPs striving to develop green organizational strategies, seeking future possibilities in creating environmentally responsible organizations, or broadening research in environmental practices.

4.2. Managerial Implications

LSPs of the future should take environmental practices more seriously than they currently do. As predicted, the logistics sector will not continue to progress in contaminating emissions and uncleaned transportation. The lack of knowledge concerning organizational design causes an excessive focus on certain sustainable logistics practices. LSPs and managers’ intrinsic environmental leadership values are more effective for cleaner operations and value environmental practices as a strategic policy incorporated into the organizational design and conceptualize the greening organization as environmentally perceived benefits. Greening efforts can empower competitiveness and sustainability. Therefore, it requires present LSPs to acquire environmental intrinsic leadership values from within employees and organizations to ultimately structure and design their organizations for the future, which begins with their vision, mission, and process of organization acceptance of greening.
The appropriate organizational design and structures are crucial to support sustainable logistics practices in the green logistics industry. The corporate vision and mission must address the environmental practices and associate with the other elements of organizational design. This implies that ecological practices, sustainability, green logistics practices, or environmental resources are manifested within the emergence of organizational designs incorporated in the corporate vision and mission statement or corporate strategy that, in turn, have implications for environmental practices and firm competitiveness [7]. Additionally, they state that without formalized environmental strategy/policy, LSPs would not implement more concrete green actions [64] and indicate logistical competencies as part of an organization’s design, including emerging innovative green technologies; physical resource-capability; and the capability of knowledge, relation, and organization. The organizational culture fostering collaboration and a proactive attitude among staff members leads to sustainable strategies in practice [33]. Organizations should have sufficient support and design to realize a green organization, such as emerging green innovation and technology.
The growth of environmental care has enabled LSPs to become more environmentally receptive. Nevertheless, greening organizations is not the LSP’s corporate mission and vision priority. In order to foster the greening of LSPs, it is vital to develop new concepts that integrate environmental practices, such as the corporate vision and mission, through green organizational design as a booster. Environmentalism requires transforming all aspects of LSPs concerning how and where LSPs’ activities impact the planet and people. The environmental or green mission and vision should align with a green organization’s strategies, structure, system, and processes. Green mission and vision directed the knowledge and day-to-day decisions for LSPs/logisticians towards environmental practices by restructuring green organizational designs.
Managers with intrinsic environmental leadership values pay great attention to designing and implementing environmental practices to enhance their reputation and image, competitiveness, environmental preservation, human well-being, and service differentiation and innovation. Emotional, biospheric (i.e., valuing the environment), altruistic (i.e., respecting the welfare and well-being of other human beings), egoistic (i.e., valuing personal resources), and hedonic values (i.e., valuing pleasure and comfort) could construct environmental intrinsic leadership values among managers. Those with little values tend to delay their moral obligation or wait for the external-green factor pressures such as stakeholders, government, and regulation to adopt and implement green logistics.

5. Conclusions

The nonexistence of LSP’s sustainable performance model from a scientific perspective induces this research work. Hence, it calls to address such knowledge gaps. This investigation of environmental practices in the logistics industry reveals some critical insights. It provides a systematic literature review of the sustainable concerns of LSPs. It is incorporated into the organizational design of logistics service providers (LSPs) that consolidates the environmental and logistics literature, presenting the most recent and holistic view of knowledge and more critical assessments in future research. The findings reveal theoretical-driven empirical evidence that explains leaders’ environmental intrinsic value leading them to green logistics implementation and is more formally effective by organizational design structures.
The findings confirm the study model that environmental leadership intrinsic values are significant for LSPs to boost human health and advanced environmental practices. This novel study contributes to existing research and knowledge in strategic environmental management, such as green human resources, green human capital, green logistics, carbon footprint, and sustainable development. By understanding insights into LSPs’ responses to environmental concerns, the study discovers that scholars and practitioners neglect sustainable logistics practices from the firm’s and leadership’s views but exaggerate their green factor, practice and impact.
The evidence appears that some LSPs are environmentally responsive, indicating LSPs’ attention to protecting the natural environment and enhancing sustainable/green logistics practices, highlighting the essential insights of greening LSPs and presenting how dimensions of organizational designs comprising of the organization’s mission and vision, structure, and formal systems; organizational processes and culture; competitive strategies; and technology competency lead to contributes to a new mechanism of a sustainable model for LSPs. The study suggests prioritizing environmental practices into specific organizational designs to ascertain sustainability performance and competitiveness for LSPs through managers’ intrinsic environmental leadership values.
The study holistically develops a sustainable performance model for fundamental research, exciting calls for empirical evidence and generalizability, and strengthening findings and theories. However, the study has some limitations that have potential opportunities for future research. This study needs further investigation and empirical research for better explanations and generalizability. Research presented empirical evidence from the limited scope of LSP. Therefore, it recommends targeting a broader research scope and different contexts of crises to investigate the motives of sustainable logistics as core aspects of overall LSPs environmental practices that, in their essence, aim to support the people and planet around the globe to ascertain the competitiveness. The following research should predict new or other environmental intrinsic leadership values affecting organization designs to quicken environmental strategy and implementation. Future studies should further analyze the influences between values, structures, and the extent of environmental practices and performance outcomes by generalizing quantitative research. It would be interesting if the subsequent research approaches other techniques to explore the sustainable model through different perspectives or longitudinal studies.

Funding

This research was funded by Universiti Sains Malaysia, Grant RU 1001/PMGT/8016031.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Not applicable.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Universiti Sains Malaysia for the fund given.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Sustainability 15 01444 g001 550
Figure 1. Methodology overview.
Figure 1. Methodology overview.
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Figure 2. Number of publications per year.
Figure 2. Number of publications per year.
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Figure 3. Number of publications per journal.
Figure 3. Number of publications per journal.
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Figure 4. Number of publications per methodology.
Figure 4. Number of publications per methodology.
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Figure 5. Number of publications per geographic.
Figure 5. Number of publications per geographic.
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Figure 6. Environmentally sustainable model.
Figure 6. Environmentally sustainable model.
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Table
Table 1. Summary of past review papers on environmental.
Table 1. Summary of past review papers on environmental.
TitleSourceReview YearFocus
Planning problems in intermodal freight transport: accomplishments and prospects[21]1990–2005Intermodal freight transport: strategic, tactical, operational planning decisions and solution methods.
Environmental sustainability in logistics and freight transportation: A literature review and research agenda[19]1994–2011Logistics and freight transportation: sustainability initiatives, factors of its adoption, adoption benefits, barriers to adoption, and the evaluation and measurement of environmental initiatives.
Knowledge management in environmental sustainability practices of third-party logistics service providers[20]2000–20143PLs’ environmental sustainability: green initiatives and influencing factors, energy efficiency in road freight transport companies, buyer’s perspective and collaboration, knowledge management in sustainability.
The Physical Internet–review, analysis and future research agenda[9]2011–2017Physical Internet based on four factors: organizational readiness, external pressure, perceived benefits, and adoption for sustainable, interoperable, and collaborative freight transport.
The role of environmental sustainability in the freight transport mode choice[10]1970–2010Role of environmental sustainability and intermodal transport in transport mode decisions within the EU.
Environmental sustainability in the service industry of transportation and logistics service providers: Systematic literature review and research directions[11]1960–2014Logistics service providers (LSPs): green initiatives, the relationship between green initiatives and performance, factors influencing their adoption, customer perspective in the sustainable supply chain, ICTs supporting green initiatives.
Decision support systems for sustainable logistics: a review and bibliometric analysis[22]1994–2015Decision support systems for sustainable logistics: key themes of identified literature.
A literature review on environmental concerns in logistics: trends and future challenges[18]2009–2018Review and presents a generic conceptual model for understanding the implementation process of environmental practices in logistics: reverse logistics, closed-loop logistics, green logistics, and environmental logistics.
Table
Table 2. Environmental practices implementation by organizational design.
Table 2. Environmental practices implementation by organizational design.
Dimensions of
Organizational Design		Environmental PracticesSource
Mission and VisionA firm vision for sustainability and thereby incorporates the strategies such as Go Green, Go Help, and Go Teach.
Incorporated the environmental principles in their mission statement.
Incorporated Green logistics principles into the company strategy and operation.
Strategy promoting the use of cleaner transport modes and more environmentally friendly vehicles.		[7,31,32,33]
Structure and formal systemFormal efforts toward environmental sustainability.
Formal environmental policy or strategy.
Environmental management system for assessing, monitoring, and reporting on the environmental impacts:
-
Administrative office or appointing staff members for monitoring the environmental performance and creating direct ties with top management.
-
Green management team.
-
Measurement and assessment.
-
Information system.
-
Process standardization, e.g., ISO 14001, GHG protocol.
[34,35,36,37,38]
Organizational process and cultureKnowledge and awareness or education and training about ethical and environmental operations.
Resource optimization: transport and warehouse capacity.
Preservation		[7,31,37,39,40,41,42,43,44,45]
Competitive strategyEnvironmental sustainability as a source of competitive advantage
Intermodality—Transport of goods by multiple modes of transportation.
Intra-organizational environmental practices.
Cooperation between the LSPs, customers, and other stakeholders.
Coordination—managing the interdependencies between the activities of the business functions within a company and between the companies.		[7,31,35,37,41,43,45,46,47,48,49,50,51]
Technology competencyTechnology or software for facilitating environmental sustainability and energy efficiency.
Modern vehicles cause fewer emissions.
Electric and low carbon emitting vehicles.
More efficient diesel engines, automatic transmission vehicles, and natural gas–powered units to company fleets.
Technology capability:
Intelligent vehicle technologies: this category includes several advanced vehicles or accessories used in transport for reducing adverse environmental impact.
Warehouse technologies: this category includes several advanced instruments, machinery, or accessories used in the warehouse for reducing adverse environmental impact
IT, accessories, and green software: this category includes several green information and software systems.
Generic energy-efficient technology, equipment, and accessories: this category includes energy-efficient technology, equipment, and accessories that use commonly in the facilities of LSPs.		[7,42,52,53]
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