Green supply chain relationships

It has often been asserted that green manufacturing can influence internal business processes, alter organization structure, and change supplier relationships. We conducted a qualitative study to examine the change in relationship structure between a Chinese electronics manufacturer and its supplier following the implementation of a green production strategy. We find that green production promoted the development of more environmentally-friendly products and materials through innovations in production procedures and techniques. Green production also strengthened the collaboration between manufacturer and supplier since they worked closer on environment performance improvement and supply chain cost reduction. Chinese traditional relationship structures - Guanxi - also played a crucial role in prompting the manufacturer to offer unprecedented support to its supplier in the latter´s green process development, rather than to cease business relationship when the supplier found it hard to cope with the changes. We infer that implementing green production strategies could enable manufacturers to increase their power base in the supply chain.