a b s t r a c tThe literature on supply chain management (SCM) has consistently promoted the "bright side" of collaborative buyer-supplier relationships (BSRs). Based on the social capital argument, SCM scholars have investigated how a buyer can gain access to and leverage resources through its collaborative BSRs. Our study extends this research stream by considering the "dark side" of social capital in BSRs. It evaluates how social capital in its cognitive, relational, and structural forms contributes to or impedes value creation within BSRs. Both primary survey measures and secondary objective measures have been used in data analysis. The results show the presence of both the bright side, confirming the existing literature, and the dark side, extending the literature. There is an inverted curvilinear relationship between social capital and performance: Either too little or too much social capital can hurt performance. This study confirms that building social capital in a collaborative BSR positively affects buyer performance, but that if taken to an extreme it can reduce the buyer's ability to be objective and make effective decisions as well as increase the supplier's opportunistic behavior. Our study also examines how a buyer can delay the emergence of the dark side. It opens up new research avenues in the collaborative BSR context and suggests directions for future research and practice.

Although multinational companies (MNCs) have increasingly embraced a sustainability strategy for their own operations, fewer have tried to engage their (tier‐one) suppliers in their sustainability initiatives. It is even rarer that MNCs engage their suppliers' suppliers (lower‐tier suppliers), despite the latter having a higher incidence of violations with more acute environmental and social impacts that can jeopardize the MNCs’ operations and reputation. We conducted inductive research on three supply networks in the automotive, electronics, and consumer product/pharmaceutical industries. We collected data on three leading sustainable MNCs and a subset of 9 tier‐one suppliers and 22 lower‐tier suppliers and complemented that information with data on several NGOs and industry organizations. This study (1) reveals that many lower‐tier suppliers address their environmental and labor issues passively and constitute the riskiest suppliers in a supply network; (2) provides a grounded theoretical framework for managing a sustainable supply network that accounts for multiple network members as well as three sustainability dimensions (the 3Ps: profit, people, and planet); and (3) shows how processes MNCs use to manage their suppliers differ from processes these suppliers use with their own (lower‐tier) suppliers. The study reveals the practices that leading sustainable MNCs use to manage their supply networks and provides important future research directions.

Research on buyer–supplier relationships (BSRs) has often focused on only one side of the relationship and, thus, has tended to overlook asymmetries. Yet, a buyer (supplier) may often deal with a bigger supplier (buyer) or one that has higher levels of trust, respect, and reciprocity. Therefore, we examined how two types of asymmetries—size and relational capital—affect perceived opportunism and performance. We used dyadic data from 106 buyers and their matched suppliers gathered from a survey and an archival database. The results demonstrate that the degree and direction of both asymmetries affect the BSR. Our results also reveal that an imbalance of relational capital in a firm's favor may have the opposite effect from that intended. In other words, the firm's counterpart perceives more, rather than less, firm opportunism. The results also suggest that a buyer observes lower benefits in the presence of size asymmetry, whereas the supplier's perception of benefits is unaffected. Thus, our research represents a significant step forward in understanding BSRs and asymmetries by (i) bringing attention to two key asymmetries inherent in BSRs and (ii) showing that these asymmetries are not unidirectional in their influence on perceived opportunism and performance.

Carbon transparency, once a niche practice, is increasingly becoming institutionalized. Firms are now required to report not only their operations' carbon emissions but also their suppliers'. This research explores the institutional pressures emanating from buyers and industry peers driving supplier firms to disclose high‐quality carbon emission publicly—our concept of carbon transparency. Many firms are increasingly adopting incentives to engage their employees in corporate climate change programs. Thus, we study the impact of three institutional pressures—coercive, mimetic, and normative—and examine when these pressures are more (or less) effective for driving supplier carbon transparency depending on the presence of climate change incentives. We used Carbon Disclosure Project's supply chain program (CDP‐SCP) as our research context. To gain deeper insight into the CDP‐SCP as well as the drivers and challenges of suppliers' carbon transparency, we conducted interviews with three CDP officials, three CDP‐SCP members (i.e., buyers), and six CDP‐SCP participants (i.e., suppliers). To test our hypotheses, we used a unique dataset from CDP‐SCP and complemented it with four other archival datasets for a sample of 835 suppliers operating in 41 countries during the 2013–2015 period. The results show that suppliers without climate change incentives are more vulnerable to coercive and mimetic pressures, whereas suppliers with climate change incentives are more receptive to normative pressure in terms of how much carbon transparency they exhibit. Thus, our study proposes an extensive concept of supplier carbon transparency, provides a comprehensive analysis of its external/internal drivers, and reveals when institutional pressures are more/less effective in eliciting supplier carbon transparency. This research also provides strategies for how buyers, suppliers, and CDP can foster more carbon transparency in supply chains.

This study conducts an investigation of interorganizational trust and its positive and negative effects. We consider how positive and negative effects operate differently under two types of uncertainties—buyer dependence and market instability. Trust is studied in the buyer–supplier relationship (BSR) context from the buyer’s perspective. The analysis is conducted based on survey data and secondary archival data from a sample of 133 BSRs. Results show that trust follows an inverted-U shape with performance. There is a point at which the negative effects of trust offset its benefits, and beyond that point, performance declines. The results also suggest that the positive and negative effects of trust become more pronounced when buyers are highly dependent on suppliers or when environmental uncertainty surrounding buyers is low. Trust’s negative effects are more severe for those buyers that are highly dependent and operate in stable markets.