Journal of Supply Chain Management最新文献

Buyer–supplier relationships provide ample opportunities for trust violations to occur. Yet the literature on the impact and outcomes of violations of trust in buyer–supplier relationships is underdeveloped. In this study, we report the results from three complementary scenario-based experiments that evaluate the impact of a supplier-induced violation on a buyer's trust in that supplier. We establish a spillover effect of supplier integrity violations onto the buyer's competence dimension of trust, and of supplier competence violations onto the buyer's integrity dimension of trust. We also examine the role of inter-organizational governance, finding that contractual and relational governance are differentially effective at mitigating trust damages experienced by a buyer after a supplier violation. Specifically, we observe that relational governance helps mitigate damages to buyer's trust following a supplier competence violation, whereas some evidence suggests that contractual governance serves to preserve buyer's trust following a supplier integrity violation. These findings have important theoretical and managerial implications for the management of buyer–supplier relationships. We discuss why the governance structures adopted by firms involved in a buyer–supplier relationship have distinct impacts on trust assessments following a violation.

This study develops and tests the synchromodality construct, a novel supply chain concept that integrates the flexible use of different transport modes based on real-time information. At a time when global supply chains are complex and subject to uncertainty, synchromodality has emerged at the forefront of research and practice as a tool to ensure efficient delivery performance and thus supply chain competitiveness. Despite synchromodality is attracting the attention of leading companies and policy makers, only scholars within the transport research community have engaged with the topic so far. We believe a supply chain management perspective is missing, but essential, to develop the full potential of synchromodality. Our study shows that synchromodality capabilities encapsulate four key elements: visibility, integration, multi-modal transport, and flexibility. Thanks to a three-stage research approach exploiting multiple methods, this study conceptualizes, develops, and validates the first synchromodality measurement model, which reflects the multidimensional nature of the concept. We hope to set the stage for a number of potential future research opportunities that can explore synchromodality implementation and outcomes.

Increased globalization, varying customer requirements, extended product lines, uncertainty regarding supplier performance, and myriad related factors make supply chains utterly complex. While previous research indicates that supply chain complexity plays an important role in explaining performance outcomes, the accumulating evidence is ambiguous. Thus, a finer-grained analysis is required. By meta-analyzing 27,668 observations across 102 independent samples from 123 empirical studies, we examine the link between supply chain complexity and firm performance. While the preponderance of evidence from previous studies identifies supply chain complexity as detrimental to firm performance, our results illustrate that although supply chain complexity has a negative effect on operational performance, it has a positive effect on innovation performance and financial performance. Furthermore, we also distinguish among different levels of supply chain (i.e., upstream, downstream, and internal) and observe nuanced findings. Finally, our findings also reveal moderating effects of construct operationalization and study design characteristics. We discuss implications for theory and practice and provide avenues for future research.

Firms must continually adjust their operations and those of their supply chain members in response to a continually evolving external environment. Many of these modifications are non-contractible in that firms cannot devise and enforce contracts on these behaviors. In this research, we extend property rights theory of the firm (PRTF) by suggesting that small entrepreneurs’ ownership of assets used to perform delegated tasks does not always incentivize small entrepreneurs to undertake non-contractible actions (NCAs) as assumed by canonical PRTF. We argue that the ability of asset ownership to incentivize small entrepreneurs to undertake NCAs will be muted when undertaking NCAs reduces small entrepreneurs’ productivity. We test our hypotheses by examining how trucking companies’ use of independent contractors affected the rate at which they improved compliance with different types of safety rules following a major regulatory change. Consistent with our arguments, we find that the use of independent contractors slowed carriers’ rate of firm-wide improvement on compliance with hours-of-service and vehicle maintenance rules relative to driving safety rules. These results, which remain after extensive robustness testing, have important implications for theory and practice.

Firms can adopt several strategies to increase their robustness to potential supply chain (SC) disruptions. One promising strategy is the use of a cross-functional team with representatives from functional departments. Such a team may facilitate sharing relevant information, enabling the firm to respond effectively to SC disruption warnings. However, despite their potential, cross-functional teams also differ in their ability to respond to SC disruption warnings and to ensure firm robustness. Extending insights from information-processing theory and team research to the field of SC management, we propose that a cross-functional team’s ability to handle high numbers of SC disruption warnings depends on the extent to which the team adopts centralized decision-making, with one or two members orchestrating the decision-making process. We also introduce internal integration problems as a mediating mechanism explaining why a cross-functional team lacking centralized decision-making may be unable to handle high numbers of SC disruption warnings. In two independent studies, we use multi-source data on cross-functional teams’ performance in dealing with SC disruption warnings during a realistic SC management simulation; the results support our predictions.

Research on managing working conditions in the supply chain is currently conducted under the umbrella of “social” sustainability. In this introduction to the 2021 Emerging Discourse Incubator, “Managing Working Conditions in Supply Chains: Towards Decent Work,” we argue that the trajectory of this research may be insufficient for addressing decent work. This is due to four characteristics of the extant literature—buyer-centrism, product-centrism, techno-centrism, and social-centrism. As an alternative, we offer ways to ‘humanize’ research on working conditions in supply chains across four dimensions: actors, issues, contexts, and methods. Through humanization, supply chain research has the potential to make a significant scholarly impact as well as to contribute to the realization of decent work in supply chains. We use our proposed path forward as a lens to elaborate on the core contributions of the four invited papers in the Emerging Discourse Incubator.

Based on our experience of carrying out theoretically and practically sound interventions to improve working conditions in global supply chains, we show what makes interventions succeed or fail and what is required to ensure that an intervention’s results are sustainable in the future. Our suggestions are applicable to designing any intervention in supply chain research, but need tailoring to the local context. Our interventions were aimed at achieving decent working conditions in emerging-country suppliers, but our insights are applicable for all supply chain scholars. In the context of emerging-country suppliers, poor working conditions have been strongly criticized after the Rana Plaza accident and subsequently received more attention with the UN’s introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (notably, SDG 8). Tensions between productivity-enhancing and decent work logics create challenges for the design of interventions with long-lasting performance improvements. This paper presents a way of overcoming the tensions by illustrating how interventions that integrate improvements in working conditions with productivity can be designed.

This article outlines a research agenda for Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining, two fundamental labor rights essential to the achievement of “Decent Work” for workers in global supply chains. The authors argue that SCM scholars are uniquely positioned to address how workers’ freedom of association and collective bargaining rights in global supply chains could be improved. This stems, in part, from the fact that SCM researchers and industry practitioners share a common “logic of efficiency” in the analysis of supply chains. The authors suggest three broad areas of research on freedom of association and collective bargaining, with their attendant methodological implications.

Supply chains are fundamental to whether decent work flourishes or not. Not only do supply chain dynamics shape employment practices and working conditions, but they also influence business models and capabilities which structure opportunities for decent work. As scholars and policymakers race to strengthen labor standards in supply chains and confront barriers to their effective implementation, management scholars can both benefit from and advance an understanding of the role of supply chains in giving rise to indecent work, especially the business practices commonly described as forced labor and modern slavery. To help realize this potential, this article draws from my research on the business of forced labor to emphasize three points. First, there are clear and discernible patterns with respect to the root causes of forced labor in supply chains. Second, forced labor in supply chains cannot be understood in isolation of broader dynamics of work and employment, since low-waged workers tend to move in and out of conditions of forced labor in relatively short periods of time. Third, on-the-ground studies of the effectiveness of buyer-centric governance programs reveal serious gaps between corporate social responsibility standards and business practices when it comes to indicators most relevant to forced labor. I conclude with a discussion of future directions in this research agenda and highlight the potential for business scholars to make a contribution.

In this paper, we explore how supply chain theorists can engage with metaphorical imagination to develop supply chain theory. Our main purpose was to provide additional useful guidance on how scholars can approach the method of metaphoric transfer. To do this, we build on previous work on the metaphoric transfer method and develop the Metaphoric Transfer Pathways framework. The framework offers two novel approaches to working with metaphors that will help theorists to best leverage the theorizing potential of metaphors in their work. We also develop a set of evaluation criteria which can help scholars to choose which approach to metaphoric transfer to adopt and to maximize the productivity of metaphors used within their theorizing efforts. Our paper synthesizes the existing literature on metaphorical imagination in a novel way to provide accessible guidance for those looking to work with metaphor and to maximize their contribution toward developing novel supply chain theory.