Journal of Supply Chain Management最新文献

Previous research demonstrates numerous benefits of mutual commitments between parties. However, less is understood about the effect of unilateral commitments, when one party (the committer) makes a relationship-specific investment without an established current or forthcoming reciprocal commitment by the other party (the recipient). This problem is particularly relevant in the supply chain management domain, where organizations often make investments in their supply chain partners, and frequently assume great risks in doing so. To help organizations understand how they can initiate unilateral commitments to their benefit, we develop theory regarding the outcomes of unilateral commitments based on their temporal duration. We evaluate our hypothesis using data collected from three distinct studies, each using different methodologies and samples: a laboratory experiment of graduate students, a vignette experiment of operations management practitioners, and a secondary data analysis of baseball contracts. We find compelling support that unilateral commitments of shorter duration successfully drive recipient cooperative behavior; however, a significant decrease in recipient cooperation results from longer term unilateral commitments. Our research contributes broadly to the literature on unilateral commitments, and in particular its manifestation within supply chain management, where this research stands to make substantial impact due to the prevalence of unilateral commitments.

Buying organizations collaborate with their suppliers to innovate, and increasingly seek to tap into the innovation potential of technologically adept small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who are new to them. Engagement with technology-based SMEs as possible suppliers can be constrained by institutions (e.g., rules, regulations, and norms of conduct) embodied in the buying organization's procurement and supply chain strategy, processes, and practices. Although prior research has examined how institutional forces influence supplier-enabled innovation, little is known about institutional failures that are particularly germane to innovative SMEs and impede collaboration between these SMEs and buying organizations. Consistent with the focus of the second emerging discourse incubator (EDI) on researching the effects of institutions (e.g., regulations) and public policies on supply chains, we investigate how enacted innovation policies address SME-specific institutional failures in a public sector context, that of the English National Health Service (NHS). Our qualitative research reveals that public agencies responsible for policy enactment seek to promote SME supplier-enabled innovation in the supply chain through institutional change and mitigation, SME connectivity to supply chain actors, and SME supplier development support. We synthesize our findings into a research model and set of propositions which theorize on the specific mechanisms underpinning the interventions of policy-enacting agencies and their effects. Our study contributes to the literature on supplier-enabled innovation and to research focusing on collaboration between buyers and innovative small suppliers. More broadly, we generate theoretical insights regarding the role of public agencies enacting policy as a class of non-firm actors whose interventions influence the supply chain. The findings also add to our understanding of the interplay between supply chains and institutions.

While the extant literature has examined causes for buyer–supplier relationship dissolution, the restoration of severed buyer–supplier relationships has been overlooked. Drawing on organizational justice theory, our research develops and tests a model of relationship restoration. We examine how the supplier's restoration tactics—acknowledgment, compensation, and operational transparency, influence the interactional, distributive, and procedural fairness perception, respectively, of the buyer, resulting in relationship restoration. The results are based on a 2 (Acknowledgment – Yes/No) × 2 (Compensation – Yes/No) × 2 (Operational Transparency – Yes/No) vignette-based study with 390 experienced practitioners. The analysis shows that compensating the buyer and providing transparent procedures for dealing with similar situations in the future, lead to higher distributive fairness and procedural fairness, respectively, resulting in restored relationships. Compensation makes up for past supplier malperformance, whereas operational transparency mitigates future concerns. We also find that restoration tactics based on interactional justice are less effective than those based on procedural and distributive justice. There is only marginal support for the indirect positive effect of acknowledgment on restoration intentions (p < 0.10). These results point to the importance of knowing how to approach a buyer to initiate relationship restoration. Managers must understand and evaluate the specific needs of each buyer when proposing a compensatory design that appeals to the buyer. Additionally, establishing procedures that are appealing to all buyers can be a challenge for a supplier, due to the differing benefits to the supplier provided by each buyer.

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.