Inside the Manufacturing-Based Garments’ Firms: Exploring How Employee Engagement Could Enable SSCM Towards Institutional Forces for Better Performance.

The garment industry is widely recognised as posing significant environmental and social challenges, including exploitative resource use, extensive waste generation, increased energy pollution, inadequate wages and unsafe working conditions. Current research within the sector focuses predominantly on corporate, multi-tier stakeholders and supply chain partners’ actions (Nath et al., 2022, Huq and Stevenson, 2020) with limited attention paid to shop floor behaviour and how the involvement of lower-level garment employees can contribute to sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices. Admittedly, numerous studies highlight the importance of employee engagement in improving worker performance and promoting stakeholder participation in compliance initiatives (Miles, 2017; Huq et al., 2014). However, there is still a lack of contextual research that explores how employee engagement at the shop floor level can effectively support SSCM practices. Hence, this research aims to investigate how employee engagement can facilitate the implementation of SSCM practices. Specifically, the focus is on understanding how employee engagement contributes to improving business performance through the adoption of SSCM practices.