This study examines how technology integration level (til) influences sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and investigates whether Corporate Social Responsibility/Sustainable Development Goal (CSR/SDG) engagement mediates and environmental stewardship (ES) moderates, this relationship.
A three-wave, time-lagged field survey was conducted with 390 supply-chain professionals from manufacturing, technology and service firms in Lahore, Pakistan. Construct validity was established via confirmatory factor analysis. Mediation and first-stage moderated mediation were tested using PROCESS (Models 4 and 7) with 5,000 bootstrap resamples, controlling for tenure and applying marker-variable checks for common method bias.
TIL enhances SSCM both directly and indirectly through CSR/SDG engagement. ES significantly strengthens the TIL ? CSR/SDG pathway, yielding a larger conditional indirect effect of TIL on SSCM at higher stewardship levels. The integrated model explains roughly one-third of the variance in SSCM, indicating substantively meaningful sustainability gains when digital, CSR/SDG and stewardship routines are aligned.
Managers should not treat AI, IoT and blockchain as stand-alone efficiency tools but link them to SDG-aligned CSR routines and embed stewardship metrics in executive scorecards, procurement policies and audits so that digital investments translate into verifiable SSCM improvements.
The study conceptualizes TIL as an integrated digital capability, identifies CSR/SDG engagement as a governance mechanism and demonstrates ES as a boundary condition within a moderated mediation framework that integrates Resource-Based View, Dynamic Capabilities and Institutional Theory, offering a clear three-step roadmap for sustainable, digitally enabled supply chains.
