Author ORCID Identifier:

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2486-0000

Date of Graduation

9-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Supply Chain Management

Advisor/Mentor

Fugate, Brian

Committee Member

Christian Hofer

Third Committee Member

Ellie Falcone

Fourth Committee Member

Marc Scott

Fifth Committee Member

Morgan Swink

Keywords

Narrative inquiry; Panel data; Safety; Social sustainability; Supply chain; Trucking

Abstract

Social sustainability in operations and supply chain management (OSCM) centers on generating economic value through practices that safeguard people, communities, and broader societal systems impacted by the supply chain. While the importance of such practices is increasingly recognized, firms face persistent challenges in embedding social sustainability into formal management systems. This dissertation tackles three such challenges, with a particular focus on safety in trucking—a vital yet underexamined aspect from the lens of social sustainability. Safety performance in this context is influenced by the complexities of using advanced safety technologies, the demanding and solitary nature of truck driving, and the temporal nature of managerial interventions such as feedback and incentives. Further, firms often struggle to align environmental and social sustainability initiatives, risking inefficiencies when these dimensions are combined under Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) umbrella without strategic coherence. To address these issues, this dissertation comprises three essays, each examining a distinct facet of sustainability at the manager, worker and firm levels. The first essay uses narrative inquiry to qualitatively explore how safety technology influences driver behavior in the trucking industry from a managerial perspective. Drawing on the Theory of Technology Dominance (TTD), the findings highlight that while advanced safety technologies can promote compliance when supported by effective managerial communication, they can also undermine safety if cognitive misalignment occurs between drivers, managers, and the technology—or if drivers become overly reliant on automation. The second essay draws from self-efficacy theory to investigate how task familiarity impacts driver safety performance on a driver level. It further examines how the recency of managerial feedback and incentives moderates this relationship. Using a proprietary dataset from a Fortune 500 logistics provider, this essay empirically tests key hypotheses and finds that task familiarity is positively associated with safety performance. However, the analysis also reveals that the positive impact of task familiarity is weakened when managerial feedback or incentives are more recent. The third essay shifts focus to the firm level, examining how environmental and social sustainability commitments affect operational efficiency. Grounded in the resource-based view (RBV), this study tests whether the two dimensions act as complements or substitutes and how the sustainability practices of a firm’s supply base moderate these effects. This essay responds to earlier findings that firms often bundle environmental and social efforts under a general CSR umbrella without strategic alignment—potentially diluting their impact. Together, these three essays contribute to advancing social sustainability in OSCM by demonstrating how technology, routines, management interventions, and strategic alignment of sustainability goals can be integrated into formal organizational systems. The findings offer both theoretical insights and practical implications for improving safety, efficiency, and overall performance in supply chains.

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