The moderating role of sustainable maintenance on the relationship between sustainable manufacturing practices and sustainable performance for oil and gas industry

Given the growing awareness among stakeholders and society, sustainable manufacturing practices (SMPs) have become one of the most important environmental initiatives that companies should implement while performing their activities to preserve the environment and promote social welfare. However, it appears that companies’ interest in achieving economic returns has neglected the environmental and social impacts of their activities. In the context of sustainability, in addition to economic results, the impact of manufacturing activities on environmental
and social outcomes should be taken into consideration as a basis for evaluating manufacturing performance, which is called sustainable performance (SP). Therefore, this study aimed to validate a model built based on the Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV) Theory and the Stakeholder Theory about the moderating role of sustainable maintenance (SMa) on the relationship between SMPs and SP. A quantitative research
through the cross-sectional survey method with the stratified random sampling procedure was employed to gather responses from 80 oil and gas companies in Iraq. The data collected were initially screened using SPSS (version 25), while the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) by SmartPLS 3 was employed to test the hypothesised paths in this study. Specifically, the findings reveal that SMPs have a significant positive relationship with all of the dimensions of SP, i.e. economic sustainability (EcS), environmental sustainability (EnS) and social sustainability (SoS). They also indicate that SMa has a significant positive relationship with EcS, EnS and SoS. Additionally, it also points out the moderating effects of SMa are significant and positive on EcS, EnS and SoS. From the practical perspective, for
oil and gas industry (O&GI), the impact has increased more on all dimensions of SP than it was without the moderating effects. Therefore, SP can be improved by increasing environmental and sustainable initiatives by managers of the O&GI
companies.