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Firms are increasingly accountable for their suppliers' social and environmental practices. Nonmarket stakeholders nowadays do not hesitate to confront buying firms for their suppliers' misconducts by mobilizing demonstrations, social media campaigns and boycotts. This paper aims to develop a typology of response strategies by targeted firms when they face such contentions and to empirically investigate why these strategies vary among those firms.

Drawing on social movement and stakeholder salience theories, the authors develop a set of hypotheses linking their typology of four response strategies to three key contextual factors – nonmarket stakeholder salience, nonmarket stakeholder ideology and the target firm reputation – and examine them using a vignette-based experiment methodology.

The results suggest that nonmarket stakeholder salience significantly impacts the nature of response (reject or concede), whereas the nonmarket stakeholder ideology is significantly related to the intensity of response (trivial or vigorous). Interestingly, the firms' reputation was found to have no significant effect on their response strategy when they faced stakeholder contentions.

This paper adds both theoretical and methodological value to the existing literature. Theoretically, the study develops and tests a comprehensive typology of response strategies to nonmarket stakeholder contentions. Methodologically, this study is original in leveraging a vignette-based experiment that allows establishing causal factors of response strategies following a supplier sustainability misconduct.

Despite the important role that suppliers have in enhancing the environmental performance of a buyer firm, previous research has not investigated the individual-level motivations of supplier employees (representatives) in supplier-to-supplier environmental knowledge sharing. Thus, we use insights from the coopetition literature to examine how buyer firms can encourage supplier-to-supplier environmental knowledge sharing with the aim of improving the buyer’s environmental performance.

We empirically test our model using an online vignette-based experiment administered to supply chain managers. We contextualized our results using insights from interviews with senior managers representing firms operating in a broad array of industries.

We find that a supplier representative’s personal environmental values influence their commitment to an environmental consortium with a rival firm, and they are subsequently willing to share proprietary environmental knowledge. In turn, these relationships are moderated by situational factors including competitive intensity and buyer power.

The study of coopetition is an emerging stream of research in operations management. Our findings improve the understanding on how a focal actor within a buyer–supplier coopetitive network can promote environmental knowledge sharing behavior.

Buying firms are increasingly exposed to sustainability risk arising from negative conditions or potential events in their supply base that might provoke adverse stakeholder reactions. Procurement managers at these firms can pursue multiple strategies to address this risk with suppliers, including acceptance, monitoring-based mitigation, avoidance and collaboration-based mitigation. This study aims to investigate how perceived risk, supplier dependence and financial slack resources contribute to the strategic preferences of these managers.

A vignette-based experiment with procurement managers is used to examine the factors affecting the managers’ strategic preferences in managing supplier sustainability risk.

The empirical results revealed that the procurement managers’ preference for avoidance or collaboration strategies was stronger when they perceived higher risk, but their preference varied based on the degree of supplier dependence. Specifically, when they perceived a high level of risk, procurement managers were more inclined toward a monitoring strategy with dependent suppliers and preferred an avoidance strategy when they dealt with independent ones. Financial slack was also an influential factor: managers with more slack at their disposal preferred to collaborate with suppliers to address the risk; on the other hand, limited slack shifted their preference toward an acceptance strategy, regardless of the level of risk.

This study helps to develop a more nuanced picture of how procurement managers make challenging and complex trade-offs when responding to supplier sustainability risk.

This study aims to examine the extended effects of corporate (ir)responsibilities in supply chains. More specifically, the authors compare the impact of social and environmental initiatives and failures in the reputational capital of supply chain partners. The authors investigate how (and if) companies’ decisions to prioritize different sustainability dimensions in their supplier selection processes (i.e. sustainability trade-offs) affect consumers’ perception of corporate image, corporate credibility-expertise, attitude towards the firm and word-of-mouth.

The authors conducted three behavioural vignette-based experiments with 562 participants from the USA, relying on analysis of variance and t-tests analyses.

Results show that consumers perceive social irresponsibility cases as more severe than environmental ones in suppliers’ operations, penalizing buyers’ corporate image, corporate credibility-expertise and word-of-mouth. Corporate image, attitude towards the firm and word-of-mouth also have significant differences between social and environmental trade-offs. Statistically significant differences were also found between scenarios that portrayed the discovery of an irresponsible action and ones that reinforced the previous irresponsible practice in companies’ suppliers.

When types of irresponsibility practices are presented, the discovery of child labour and modern slavery conditions in suppliers damage how consumers perceive the company on corporate image and their attitude towards the organization and how they will spread word-of-mouth, reinforcing the importance of considering sustainability issues when making supplier selection decisions.

The study contributes to the understanding of how companies are perceived by their consumers regarding irresponsible practices and their impact on firms’ supplier selection decisions. Furthermore, data suggests that consumers might hierarchize sustainability dimensions, perceiving social irresponsibility cases as more severe than environmental irresponsibility ones.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether, and under what conditions, an individual’s punitive intent in response to ethical misconduct is shaped by their perceived forgiveness climate, which is their perception of how forgiving their organization is.

This study used the survey method embedded within a vignette-based experiment involving working adults.

Results show that higher perceived forgiveness climate is associated with lower punitive intent when an experience of being forgiven is salient to the disciplinary decision maker and when there are mitigating circumstances surrounding the ethical misconduct. When an experience of being unforgiven is salient to the disciplinary decision maker, higher perceived forgiveness climate is associated with higher punitive intent.

This study presents a more nuanced perspective on the conditions that shape punishment decision making in response to workplace ethical misconduct. As the findings may be specific to the measures and vignette used, future research should explore the replicability of these results using other measures and types of ethical misconduct.

The paper alerts disciplinary decision makers to the potential influence of their perceptions of the organizational context and of their personal experiences on their punishment decision making, helping avoid inappropriately punishing subordinates, which can generate employee resentment and inflated turnover.

This is the first study that examined the relationship between forgiveness and punishment in response to ethical misconduct in a workplace setting.

It is generally believed that supervisors would deter employee unethical behavior. However, drawing from social exchange theory and the theory of moral disengagement, we posit that supervisors are more willing to tolerate employee unethical behavior through moral disengagement when the perpetrator is a high performing employee.

Study 1, which measured employee unethical behavior in a specific group of doctors through a time-lagged survey, and Study 2, which manipulated employee unethical behavior with a diverse sample by a vignette-based experiment, provided convergent support for our hypothesized 1st-stage moderated mediation model. Hierarchical regression, bootstrapping and ANOVA are used to test our hypotheses.

Although supervisors generally showed a low social acceptance of an employee who engaged in unethical behavior, they were more likely to socially accept the perpetrator through moral disengagement when the employee was a high rather than a low performer.

Given that supervisor's tolerance of employee unethical behavior may be more dangerous than employee unethical behavior itself, organizations should set up an ethics committee to handle top managers' unethical behavior and consider morality equally important with performance in management practice.

The current research extends research on the interpersonal consequences of employee unethical behavior, explains how moral disengagement promotes social acceptance and identifies the moderating effect of job performance in the process.

The purpose of this research is to examine how a change in team dynamics impacts an individual's motivation to engage in helping behavior and operational performance.

An online vignette experiment and a hybrid discrete event and agent-based simulation model are used.

Study findings demonstrate how a non-core worker's perception of team dynamics influence engagement in helping behavior and system performance.

This study provides a further understanding on how team members react to changes in team processes. This study theorizes on how an individual team member responds to fairness concerns. This study also advances our understanding of the critical importance of helping behavior in a retail logistics setting. This research illustrates how the theory of strategic core and procedural justice literature can be adopted to explain team dynamics in supply chain management.

The study investigates the interaction of sustainability dimensions in supply chains. Along with the analysis of sustainability trade-offs (i.e. prioritizing one dimension to the sacrifice of others), we develop and test the concept of cross-insurance mechanism (i.e. meeting of one sustainability goal possibly attenuating the effects of poor performance in another).

Through the analysis of a 20-variation vignette-based experiment, we evaluate the effects of these issues on the corporate credibility (expertise and trustworthiness) of four tiers of a typical food supply chain: pesticide producers, farmers, companies from the food industry and retail chains.

Results suggest that both sustainability trade-offs and cross-insurance mechanisms have different impacts across the chain. While pesticide producers (first tier) and retail chains (fourth tier) seem to respond better to a social trade-off, the social cross-insurance mechanism has shown to be particularly beneficial to companies from the food industry (third tier). Farmers (second tier), in turn, seem to be more sensitive to the economic cross-insurance mechanism.

Along with adding to the study of sustainability trade-offs in supply chain contexts, results suggest that the efficiency of the insurance mechanism is not conditional on the alignment among sustainability dimensions (i.e. social responsibility attenuating social irresponsibility). In this sense, empirical evidences support the development of the cross-insurance mechanism as an original concept.

The success of a supply chain is highly reliant on effective inventory and ordering decisions. This paper systematically reviews and analyzes the literature on inventory ordering decisions conducted using behavioral experiments to inform the state-of-the-art.

This paper presents the first systematic review of this literature. We systematically identify a body of 101 papers from an initial pool of over 12,000.

Extant literature and industry observations posit that decision makers often deviate from optimal ordering behavior prescribed by the quantitative models. Such deviations are often accompanied by excessive inventory costs and/or lost sales. Understanding how humans make inventory decisions is paramount to minimize the associated consequences. To address this, the field of behavioral operations management has produced a rich body of research on inventory decision-making using behavioral experiments. Our analysis identifies primary research clusters, summarizes key learnings and highlights opportunities for future research in this critical decision-making area.

The findings will have a significant impact on future research on behavioral inventory ordering decisions while informing practitioners to reach better ordering decisions.

Previous systematic reviews have explored behavioral operations broadly or its subdisciplines such as judgmental forecasting. This paper presents a systematic review that specifically investigates the state-of-the-art of inventory ordering decisions using behavioral experiments.

While size asymmetry in buyer–supplier relationships has been studied in non-disruption contexts, this research explores how supplier size influences positive and negative supply chain disruptions. Anchoring on the commitment-trust theory (CTT), we explore buyer commitment as a mediating variable and examine how buying firms' mediated power usage depends on different supplier sizes and types of supplier-induced disruptions.

Through two scenario-based behavioral experiments, we discover different patterns in buyers' use of mediated power, contingent on the types of supplier-induced disruptions.

In negative disruptions, buyers prefer more mediated power with large suppliers to control uncertainties, using reward or coercive power strategies. In positive disruptions, we find opposite results, indicating different buyers' perceptions and actions are contingent on both the supplier size and the types of disruptions. These findings underscore the complex interplay between supplier size, buyer commitment and mediated power strategies, revealing that disruption type significantly shapes buyer responses.

This paper extends the CTT framework by considering new antecedents and outcomes. We also provide a more comprehensive understanding of buyer behavior when facing positive and negative supplier-induced disruptions. Our study has limitations. Through vignette-based behavioral experiments, there is a risk that scenarios may not accurately represent real-life situations and that decision-making dynamics could be oversimplified. Future research should incorporate nuanced measurements and conduct additional qualitative research for a comprehensive understanding.

This study enriches the understanding of the buyer-supplier relationship by expanding the CTT framework for a more comprehensive picture. We also offer nuanced insights into size dynamics and disruption types, emphasizing tailored strategies in supply chain management. The findings underscore the importance of understanding these nuances to employ tailored strategy in a business-to-business (B2B) context, as mediated power is contingent on multiple factors.