Adopting Moral Legitimacy on Supply Chain Performance of SMEs in Food Crop Production SMEs in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to assess the moral legitimacy of the supply chain performance of Zimbabwe's food crop-production small to medium scale enterprises ( SMEs.) The main objective of this study was to assess the moral legitimacy in food crop production SMEs supply chain performance in Zimbabwe's. This research was necessitated by stagnant growth, poor business practices and lack of production of competitive products by food crop production SMEs in Zimbabwe. This research is rooted in the pragmatism paradigm with a gradient mixture approach. Quantitative analysis was used to establish relationships between constituents through discriminative features. Qualitative analysis was used to gain detailed insight into specific relationships of variables. An explanatory sequential survey design with descriptive mixed methods was employed in this study. The population consisted of 5000 food crop producing SMEs targeted at companies with defined supply chains registered with the Department of Small Business Agricultural Business Services, Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Resettlement, Mashonaland Central. Data was collected from 205 food crop production SMEs through a structured questionnaire before targeting 4 participants in these SMEs supply chain category (suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and general consumers), particularly cereal crops, like maize, wheat, sorghum, millet and rice field. A questionnaire and interview guidelines were used to collect the data. Two hundred and twenty (220) questionnaires were initially selfcompleted in sampling units and two hundred and five (205) of them were correctly completed and used. Four interviews were conducted with those who completed the questionnaires correctly. The main finding was that there was a significant correlation between moral legitimacy and supply chain performance of food crop production SMEs in Zimbabwe. There were also factors that impacted the moral legitimacy of food crop SME supply chains. There have been challenges in introducing moral legitimacy into the supply chains of food crop production SMEs. Several strategies, such as conformity to external constitutes and manipulation of relevant stakeholders, were employed in the supply chains of food crop production SMEs in Zimbabwe. .Another solution has been to introduce adequate education to promote moral legitimacy and improve performance in small and medium-sized food crop production. The research suggests that for food crop production SMEs to be competitive, sustainable and prosperous, they need to adopt moral legitimacy into their supply chains.