The Effect of Top Management Support on Environmental Sustainability. Does Supplier Development Matter in the Ghanaian Cocoa Industry?

Abstract

One of the most challenging issues for stakeholders and researchers in the cocoa industry has been developing sustainability in the cocoa supply chain. This study was conducted to explore the effect of top management support on environmental sustainability in Ghana’s cocoa supply chain, as well as indicate the indirect role of supplier development in this chain. The
study was conducted using survey data from 630 Cocoa farmers in Ghana, and it employed both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to assess the validity and reliability of the study constructs. The Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used in testing the hypotheses. The findings demonstrate that both top management and supplier development are significant predictors of environmental sustainability in Ghana’s cocoa supply chain. The result also showed a significant effect of top management support on supplier development, and it further indicated that supplier development is very important as such, it cannot be ignored in the effort to improve environmental sustainability in Ghana’s cocoa supply chain. The mediating analysis explored in this study revealed that supplier development partially mediates the relationship between top management support and environmental sustainability. The findings of the study showed that an optimal level of
environmental sustainability in the cocoa supply chain can be achieved by combining top management support and supplier development. The outcome of the study dwells on crosssectional data and it covered the views of the farmers at a specific period of time. Meanwhile, using a cross-sectional strategy limits the study’s capability to examine the implications of GBSR in ensuring sustainability over a period of time. However, a longitudinal approach that follows farmers over a time period could be used to offer much more insight into (the implications of GBSR on cocoa supply chain sustainability in Ghana).