Assessing Antecedents of Socially Responsible Supplier Selection in Three Global Supply Chain Contexts

Abstract

A number of highly publicized, controversial lapses in social responsibility within global supply chains have forced managers and scholars to reexamine long‐held perspectives on supplier selection. Extending Carter and Jennings’ department‐level study of purchasing social responsibility, our research assesses the role of supply managers’ ethical intentions and three key antecedents that drive socially responsible supplier selection. Comparing evidence from firms operating in China, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, we identify three key drivers of supply managers’ ethical intentions and examine both their direct and indirect impacts on socially responsible supplier selection. We find differential support for the predictor relationships on supply manager ethical intentions across national contexts and mediated versus nonmediated models. These observations bear important implications for firms conducting global supply management.

Sustainable Global Sourcing: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…External pressures are believed to be the major drivers of ethical sourcing e.g., public pressure [65], external stakeholder pressure [24,[108][109][110], coercive and normative pressures [111], and legal pressure [112,113]. Trusting relationship/cooperation with supplier is also suggested as an important factor fostering ethical sourcing behaviour [67,108,111,114].…”

“…Hemingway and Maclagan (2004) [117] and Park and Stoel (2005) [68] propose the implementation of social sustainability by corporations could be associated with the personal value of managers. There are also other factors considered to have influence over ethical sourcing practice e.g., corporate culture, ethical orientation, labor-intensive production and traditional technologies, differences in cost levels between sourcing and recipient areas, buyer's market, short deadlines, low predictability of ordering processes, low levels of transparency and communication barriers [109,118,119].…”

“…Although country-specific characteristics have been can be identified as contingency factors [168], this element could constrain the generalizability of studies. Prior studies, regarding this aspect, are limited to purchasing managers or suppliers [49,70,109,152]. Future studies could explore this issue by conducting a comparative study of SGS between home countries and host country, since national cultures and local characteristics could influence both sustainable practice implementation and the way of responding to compliance [94,109].…”

“…Prior studies, regarding this aspect, are limited to purchasing managers or suppliers [49,70,109,152]. Future studies could explore this issue by conducting a comparative study of SGS between home countries and host country, since national cultures and local characteristics could influence both sustainable practice implementation and the way of responding to compliance [94,109]. Helin and Babri's (2015) [138] study was one of the first efforts in this respect and investigates the different ways of translating codes of conduct into different geographical contexts.…”

“…Third, Institutional theory is adopted to investigate the internal and external factors which influence the adoption of sustainable initiatives in the GS process [92,108,111,113]. Finally, stakeholder theory is employed by several studies to help understand the dynamics between stakeholders and the roles they play in SGS implementation [41,109,118]. There are also other theories that have been adopted by various researchers to explore SGS issues, e.g., agency theory [64,75], social network theory [104], resource dependency perspective [85], self-determination [103], and game theory [176].…”