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The article seeks to explain the impact of the adoption of control mechanisms by a manufacturer as a safeguard against the betrayal of trust, which could consequently have performance implications for its relationship with its supplier.

This study was conducted within the context of the relationship between a manufacturer and its major supplier and the framework was tested by survey data collected from 174 manufacturers. LISREL was used in the testing of the hypotheses.

This study reflects that a manufacturer may reduce the risk associated with trusting its suppliers by either monitoring them directly or adopting the norm of information sharing. Alternatively, it could seek to reduce risk by adopting both types of control mechanism simultaneously. Conversely, the results of this study indicate that control mechanisms, when used individually, are not effective in increasing supplier performance. However, when used in combination as plural control mechanisms, increased supplier performance can be attained.

A high level of trust placed in an exchange partner does not necessarily ensure greater success of the relationship. What this means is that firms cannot take performance for granted where trust plays a key role within the professional relationship. Therefore, firms still need to put mechanisms in place to ensure that, in the event of betrayal, their assets are protected. Among the different types of control mechanisms, the plural control mechanism results in enhanced supplier performance.

This study uses factual performance data but does not use perceptual performance measures. The ideal way to measure channel performance is to measure both perceptual and factual performance data to increase reliability.

There has been little research on control mechanisms that guarantee the protection of the trustor. This study clarifies which control mechanisms manufacturers rely on to protect themselves from breach of trust, and investigates the effects of control mechanisms on supplier performance when used as a safeguard against the betrayal of trust.

The purpose of this paper is to verify the moderating role of trust in the relationships between environmental uncertainty and a manufacturer's propensity for vertical control over its supplier, and between environmental uncertainty and the manufacturer's satisfaction with the supplier performance. It also confirms a threshold effect of trust, i.e. the moderating role of trust is present up until a threshold value of trust is reached.

Survey research was conducted to collect data from manufacturers; structural equation modeling was used to purify measurement scales, and multiple regression was conducted to test the hypotheses.

This study confirmed that a manufacturer's perception of a supplier's trustworthy behavior weakens the justification for a higher degree of vertical control over its supplier's key decisions. Trust also reduces the manufacturer's discontent with its supplier's performance.

Traditional transaction cost analysis (TCA models) put too much emphasis on rationality and seldom consider the complexity of inter‐firm control in social contexts. This study demonstrates that considering trust in TCA supplements the explanations offered by TCA on buyer‐seller behaviors.

Manufacturers should determine the level of needed vertical control after assessing the level of inter‐firm trust to avoid unnecessary vertical control, which is as costly as, if not costlier than, supplier opportunism. Manufacturers should also realize the importance of formalizing continuous, two‐way information flow to further reduce supply market uncertainty, which cannot be done by trust beyond the threshold value.

This study considers both social embeddedness and TCA to enhance the explanatory power of the TCA framework. Additionally, this study shows that the moderating effect of trust is statistically significant at lower levels while the effect fades away at higher levels of trust.

Manufacturer price reduction pressure on suppliers is an important contributor to helping a manufacturer maintain a strong competitive position by keeping costs low. The benefits of trusting supplier working relations also help strengthen a manufacturer's competitive position. The purpose of this paper is to determine if manufacturer price reduction pressure and trusting working relations with the pressured suppliers, typically considered to be mutually exclusive, can co‐exist.

A structural equation modeling approach was used to analyze data covering 946 production buying situations involving 279 suppliers and six NA automotive OEMs.

Manufacturer price reduction pressure and trusting working relations with the pressured suppliers, are not mutually exclusive, they can co‐exist.

The research found that it is not the pressure that impacts the manufacturer – supplier relations, but rather it is the manner by which the manufacturer goes about pressuring its suppliers that impacts its supplier working relations. The research, however, does not directly address how a manufacturer can achieve both ends simultaneously.

Manufacturers no longer have to choose between exerting price reduction pressures on suppliers or working to achieve trusting relations with suppliers. They can successfully do both. At the same time, suppliers must recognize that these conditions may occur and when applied simultaneously ultimately benefit both parties.

This research adds to the critically under‐researched B2B pricing processes and pricing impact areas, while helping to influence managerial actions, an area in which academic B2B research is considered to be lacking.

This study aims to examine the means by which influence strategies and social mechanisms (trust and shared vision) influence the flexibility of suppliers, and its ultimate effect on the performance of manufacturers.

This study bases the major components of marketing research on previous studies related to influence strategies and flexibility in the supply‐chain. This empirical study utilized 162 SMIT survey samples.

Results show that using coercive influence strategies and developing a shared vision promote supplier flexibility and fully mediate the effects of trust on supplier flexibility. In addition, supplier flexibility has a significant positive impact on the performance of manufacturers.

The perceptions of manufacturers regarding influence strategies and social mechanisms formed the basis of this study. Future studies could focus on the reciprocal strategies of suppliers, and the influence of these actions on the effectiveness of the influence strategies employed by manufacturers.

This paper adds to the existing management guidelines addressing the problem of ensuring increased flexibility from suppliers to enable a more rapid response to the demands of customers to enhance performance.

The paper provides novel insights into the impact of influence strategies and social mechanisms on the flexibility of suppliers.

In the literature on product branding, significant attention is given to brand equity in the consumer context, but relatively little attention is paid to the application of the concept in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Even less research exists on the role of brand equity in the retailing context. Retailers are often seen as irrelevant to the source of brand value, resulting in manufacturers not targeting retailers to help them build stronger brands. Potential occurs, therefore, for some channel conflict to exist between manufacturers and retailers. On the one hand, retailers tend to focus on building their own, private brands to differentiate themselves from other retail competitors and to increase their power in relation to manufacturer brands. At the same time, most retailers still need to create a good image in the consumer marketplace by selling famous, manufacturer-branded products. In other words, retailers often have to sell famous brands even if they would prefer to sell other brands including their own. Manufacturers tend to focus their brand-building efforts on the consumer market to entice consumers to insist that retailers stock their brands, rather than placing any real emphasis on building a strong and positive brand relationship with the retailer directly.

Collaborative solutions are increasingly being proposed to generate value in supply chains. Concurrently, firms have progressively outsourced logistics operations to logistics service providers (LSPs). However, many questions remain unsolved regarding the role played by LSPs in supporting supply chain collaboration (SCC) in triadic rather than dyadic contexts. This study aims to explore the relational mechanisms that LSPs can leverage to foster value creation through collaboration, elaborating on an existing theory about SCC by focussing on logistics triads.

By leveraging the view of the network theory, a multiple case study approach was adopted. Seven cases having logistics triads as units of analysis were identified and analysed within the Italian grocery supply chain, allowing for empirical investigation with a middle-range approach to extend the previous theory.

LSPs are pivotal actors that can actively promote SCC. LSPs can exploit large volumes and asset availability to increase efficiency while improving logistics flexibility and developing regular and trustworthy relationships with the other triad members. Building upon their logistics capabilities and the relational mechanisms in place, LSPs can help manufacturers collaborate with retailers by improving mutual trust and communication, acting as trust builders or trust conductors within the triad.

The study explores the role of LSPs in logistics triads, extending the previous literature. It highlights that LSPs facilitate not only supply and demand integration but also relational integration between firms. Trust emerges as a fundamental building block for SCC, as LSPs can look beyond economic benefits to foster partnerships that empower the co-development of original collaborative solutions.

This study aims to investigate the effect of commitment and trust on satisfaction and sequential effect of satisfaction on relational outcomes (i.e. performance and governance cost) in a manufacturer–supplier relationship. Authors of this paper explore the relationship quality parameters such as trust, commitment and satisfaction and its effect on improving the performance and reducing the governance cost between the partners, as well as the effect of relationship duration on the antecedents and relational outcomes.

Based on the conceptual framework developed by authors, hypotheses were formulated, to test the effect of trust and commitment to performance and governance cost through the mediating effect of satisfaction in the manufacturer–supplier relationship. Data were collected from 196 manufacturers from the western part of India, through a structured questionnaire, and collected quantitative data were analyzed through structural equation modeling.

The analysis of the sample of 196 manufacturers suggests a positive relationship between satisfaction and commitment and between satisfaction and trust. The study suggests that increased satisfaction lowers governance cost as well as suggests a positive relationship between satisfaction and performance in a manufacturer–supplier relationship. As a relationship grows in an early stage, relationship performance improves, and as the relationship matures, the relationship performance diminishes.

Findings suggest that managers in business and industrial markets shall focus on commitment in the relationship rather than just trust that leads to satisfaction. It also suggests that a higher level of satisfaction enhances the performance and reduces the governance cost in a manufacturer–supplier relationship.

This research makes four contributions: first, it enquires the direct impact of trust and commitment to a manufacturer’s satisfaction; second, it investigates the indirect impact of trust on a manufacturer’s satisfaction through commitment in the relationship; third, it investigates the mediating satisfaction between trust-commitment and relationship outcomes (relationship performance and governance cost); fourth, the research shows the impact of relationship duration regarding the relational outcomes and the dimensions of relationship quality into a short-term and long-term relationship. It also uniquely suggests that the presence of commitment has a catalytic effect on satisfaction. Research offers managerial implication to increase the performance and to reduce the governance cost in the relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of two typical relationship management approaches (trust relationship with suppliers and reciprocity) on manufacturer resilience in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Moreover, this paper aims to deepen the understanding of environmental uncertainty's moderating effect on the association between the trust relationship with suppliers (TRS) and reciprocity.

Structural equation modeling has been used to test the hypotheses on 361 Chinese manufacturing firms' managers and independent directors during the COVID-19 crisis.

The results reveal that reciprocity positively enhances three dimensions of manufacturer resilience, namely, preparedness, responsiveness and recovery capability. Reciprocity positively mediates the relationships between TRS and preparedness, responsiveness and recovery capability. Moreover, environmental uncertainty moderates the association between TRS and reciprocity.

This study highlights the critical role of reciprocity, the relational governance approach, in enhancing manufacturer resilience in practice. This paper suggests that during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, managers should adopt trust and reciprocity in supplier relationship governance to strengthen the resilience of manufacturing companies and adapt effective strategies according to the environment.

This study is unique in developing new scales of manufacturer resilience through interviews and surveys with Chinese manufacturers and theoretical research. Based on the social capital theory and social exchange theory, this study shed light on the role of trust and reciprocity. It also bridges relational governance theory with the literature on manufacturing firm resilience literature to help manufacturers better understand the transdisciplinary links between relationship management and resilient operations in emergencies.

More than two decades long technological improvements in information sharing have not yet ensured a flawless execution of vendor managed inventory (VMI) and left interested parties wondering about the reasons of poor results. Although VMI is a collaborative tool, the relational factors in a VMI setting have not received enough attention due to challenges in obtaining relational buyer-supplier data in addition to extant focus on analytical approaches. The purpose of this paper is to investigate post-implementation relational factors in order to extract relevant insights.

Accounting for the duration of the VMI relationship, the authors focus on two dimensions of VMI often ignored post-implementation: dependence of the buyer on the VMI-supplier and trust of the buyer in the VMI-supplier. Cross-sectional data were collected using a survey collected from distributors mostly in auto and electrical supply industries, which have their inventories managed by manufacturers through VMI arrangements. The sample was obtained from a leading third-party VMI-platform service provider that serves thousands of distributor-manufacturer locations with billions of dollars in sales orders. Multiple ordinary least squares regression has been used to test the hypotheses.

This paper provides empirical support that in the post-implementation stage, longer VMI relationships are associated with higher distributor dependence on the manufacturer. In addition, too much dependence could actually hurt the distributor’s trust in the manufacturer.

The authors propose that distributors maintain some of the purchasing and inventory management skills in house to limit their dependencies on the manufacturers. Manufacturers should also invest in trust-building activities, such as regular communications with distributors.

This is the first study providing empirical evidence on the positive association between length of VMI relationship and buyer dependence on the supplier, and curvilinear dependence-trust link in a post-implementation VMI context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effect of trusting beliefs about a store on country‐of‐origin (COO) effects. The paper suggests that three trusting beliefs (ability beliefs, benevolence beliefs and integrity beliefs) about a retail store moderate negative effects of COO on product evaluation and purchase intention. However, under high manufacturer risk conditions, only benevolence beliefs moderate the negative COO effects.

The toy industry is chosen as the study context. The first three hypotheses are tested with survey data collected from 224 participants. The last hypothesis is tested with data collected from 338 participants. Hierarchical moderated regression was used in the testing of the hypotheses.

The results show that while only benevolence and integrity beliefs about a store weaken the negative effect of COO on product evaluations, all three trusting beliefs lessen the negative impact of COO on consumers' purchase intentions. However, when manufacturer risk is high, only benevolence beliefs have a significant moderating effect.

The findings show that manufacturers can reverse the negative cycle, or at least minimize their losses, if they choose those retailers that consumers have high trusting beliefs about as their channel members. Similarly, if they can signal that they are benevolent and honest stores, retailers can balance their customers' negative evaluations of products made in certain countries with negative image.

Given the recent product recalls and concerns, the toy industry presents an ideal case to study the effect of trusting beliefs on COO effects. Nonetheless, the focus on a single industry does limit the generalizability of the findings. The authors recommend that future researchers examine these relationships in studies focusing on other product categories.

To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the impact of individuals' trusting beliefs about a store on COO effects.