Interactive effects of organizational resources on sustainable product design practices: a resource orchestration perspective

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interactive effects of a firm’s strategic sustainability orientation (SSO) and customer relationship capital (CRC) on sustainable product design practices (SPDP).

The authors examine the interactive effects of two firm resources, namely, SSO and CRC, as they relate to SPDP, using survey data from 132 manufacturers in Malaysia.

The findings show that the effect of SSO on SPDP is stronger when CRC is low, than otherwise. The authors also find that the interactive effects of the firm-level resources stated above are stronger when customer pressures (CPs) are higher than when they are low.

The authors contribute to the literature by studying the effects of firm-level strategic resources and their interactions as they relate to SPDP. An important limitation of this research is the usage of single-source data and single-period data.

Managerially, this research provides new insights into how organizations should respond to CPs while understanding the counterintuitive but disabling effects of customer relationship assets.

The findings are important to society because most of the environmental impact arising from the production, consumption and disposal of products is a direct consequence of decisions made at the product design stage and an unintended consequence of the marketing decision-making processes that underlie marketing strategy formulation that fails to recognize ecosystems impact as a standard decision influence.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to study the effects of firm-level strategic resources and their interactions as they relate to SPDP.