Supply Chain Digital Transformation Misalignment and Supplier Greenwashing: A Dual‐Path Perspective

ABSTRACT Supply chain digital transformation often progresses unevenly across upstream and downstream partners, creating digital transformation misalignment. Drawing on the ability‐motivation‐opportunity (AMO) framework, this study examines how such misalignment affects supplier greenwashing and develops a dual‐path perspective to explain how different directions of digital asymmetry shape supplier responses. Using data on Chinese supply‐chain relationships, we find that supply chain digital transformation misalignment significantly increases supplier greenwashing. Further analyses reveal two distinct behavioural pathways. When suppliers lag behind customers in digital maturity, digital capability constraints limit their ability to undertake and substantiate substantive environmental actions, while relational and transactional pressures increase the incentives to demonstrate environmental responsibility, giving rise to a capability‐constrained symbolic response. In contrast, when suppliers outperform customers in digital maturity, superior information‐processing and information‐control capabilities can weaken customer monitoring and verification, creating opportunities for information‐enabled strategic decoupling. We further identify three mechanisms through which digital transformation misalignment facilitates supplier greenwashing: supply chain information asymmetry, transactional pressure and supervision gaps. In addition, buyer dependency and industry environmental sensitivity amplify the effect of digital transformation misalignment, whereas environmental regulation mitigates it. This study contributes to the supply chain sustainability literature by conceptualizing digital transformation misalignment as a form of sustainability governance imbalance and by demonstrating how different configurations of ability, motivation, and opportunity can generate supplier greenwashing through distinct behavioural pathways. The findings also provide implications for strengthening environmental information governance and monitoring in digitally fragmented supply networks.