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The main purpose of this study is to improve the understanding and comprehension of the supply chain leadership concept. To this aim, the paper systematically reviews and synthesises the current academic literature in this emerging field, unveiling research gaps and discussing a future research agenda. The review was performed by selecting papers from leading journals in the operations and supply chain management field (using the Scopus and Web of Science academic search engines). Overall, 51 relevant papers were identified through the review process. After providing an overview of classical leadership theories, the paper introduces a definition for the supply chain leadership concept. The theoretical characterisation of such concept is then investigated, through the identification of dominant leadership theories employed to explain and characterise supply chain leadership. Also, the study provides a thematic analysis of supply chain leadership styles and their influence on supply chain practices. Employed research methodologies, along with geographical specificities and supply chain orientations of previous studies, are also scrutinised. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide a holistic systematic literature review in the supply chain leadership domain. Therefore, this contribution is an important first step in order to establish robust theoretical frameworks involving the constructs of supply chain leadership and to provide a foundation for further studies in this field.

In past few years, sustainable supply chain management practices have been getting increased attention in Chinese industries. With growing regulatory and market pressure to adopt green practices, SMEs are increasingly looking for innovative techniques to simultaneously improve the greenness of their processes while improving their operational performance. The paper aims to explore the green practices of Chinese SMEs in the packaging sector across different activities in its supply chain and understand the impact of these green practices in improving the operational performance. Case studybased research methodology is adopted in this study and semi-structured interviews are conducted to collect data from seven SMEs. Both in-case and cross-case analyses are performed to understand the green practices being adopted with the focus on improving the operational performance. The empirical analysis indicates that although most of SMEs understand the importance of green practices, they have limited knowledge to integrate their green practices to improve the operational performance. Integration and alignment of green activities with the operational improvement measures are identified as critical factors to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.

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