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Top1. Introduction
In this increasingly globalized world, the businesses are confronting with enormous challenges to remain competitive. And among many others, Greening is one of an important sustainability challenge which warrants organizational level intervention (Kuei et al., 2015; Savita et al., 2016). Therefore, the incorporation of green perspective into firm’s strategic, functional, and operational levels is inevitable (Zhu et al., 2017). However, the debate over whether the green practices should be holistic encompassing both internal and external aspects of businesses, is still in its infancy stage (Linton et al., 2007; Zhu et al., 2008; Kohli & Hawkins, 2015; Vanalle et al., 2017). In this context, increasing concerns have been raised by various stakeholders over the organizational efforts and practices in going green (Linton et al., 2007). Though greening efforts entails very high investments costs (Freedman & Jaggi, 1981; Rothenberg et al., 2001; Wiseman, 1982; Zhu & Sarkis, 2004; Zhu, Sarkis, & Geng, 2005; Zhu, Sarkis, & Lai, 2007), nonetheless, its benefits are widely believed to outweigh the costs associated with it (Diabat et al., 2013; Kleindorfer et al., 2005; Orlitzky et al., 2003).
Going green is particularly a challenging task for the manufacturing firms because they have to maintain the production efficiency amid green considerations (Majumdar & Sinha, 2019; Tumpa et al., 2019). To make matters worse, the emergence of a world-wide pandemic in the shape of COVID-19 has made the task of going green even more challenging by disrupting the already in-placed greening processes (Araz et al., 2020). Thus, it goes without saying that COVID-19 has disrupted the supply chain (SC) networks worldwide. For instance, the SC of 94% of the Fortune 1000 firms have been negatively affected by the pandemic (Fortune, 2020). Around 5 million companies across the globe have direct or indirect supplier relationships with firms operating from Wuhan, China (the city where COVID-19 originated). Besides, 938 out of 1000 Fortune firms have tier-two or tier-one suppliers in the Wuhan region (Dun & Bradsteet, 2020). Therefore, it led to negative consequences on the global supply chain due to the lockdown of Wuhan city. Similarly, it has been observed that those regions having factories, warehouses and other operational facilities were often subject to closures and lockdowns because of high population densities. The resulting decrease in the socialization and commercial activities has led to undermine the operational and financial sustainability of the firms (Linton & Vakil, 2020).