Impact of social sustainability on supply chain performance with mediating effect of differentiation

Sustainability which is often explained as meeting the present needs without compromising the ability of future's, considering its three pillars –Environmental, Economic and Social- has recently gained more attention due to the serious changes the world has been going through. Social sustainability takes into concern the human side of sustainability. Socially-sustainable supply chain (SSSC) addresses social issues related with all tiers of a supply network and may provide operational and strategic benefits as well as a positive impact on society. Many studies explore Social Sustainability Practices (SSP) in supply chain or their impact on supplier performance. However, within the literature review we have not been able to detect the presence of studies that investigate how supply chain key performance indicators (KPIs) are affected by the adoption of specific dimensions of social sustainability, nor had we observed the effect of competitive advantage on the relationship of social sustainability adoption and supply chain. Detecting this gap, we aim at exploring the impact of social sustainability on Supply Chain Performance (SCP) in terms of specific KPIs such as Perfect Order Measurement (POM), Order Fill Rate (OFR), and Cash-to-Cash Cycle Time (C2C) that were chosen using IT2F AHP, while trying to measure the effect of differentiation as a competitive advantage on that relationship. A further contribution of this study is trying to achieve is to explore this relationship in the Moroccan market that has not been approached before by any scholar. We collected data through surveys sent to Moroccan manufacturing companies in various industries. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) using AMOS software has been used for data analysis and instrument measurement. Later we tested the mediating effect of Differentiation as a competitive advantage. This work's main finding is that there is a significant correlation between the SSP and the enhanced SCP in the light of the three mentioned indicators, also it has been found that Differentiation as competitive advantage has a total mediation effect on the two aforementioned constructs' relationship .