The Dark Side of Buyer Power: Supplier Exploitation and the Role of Ethical Climates
By Martin C. Schleper, Constantin Blome, David A. Wuttke. 2017
121 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Media increasingly accuse firms of exploiting suppliers, and these allegations often result in lurid headlines that threaten the reputations and therefore business successes of these firms. Neither has the phenomenon of supplier exploitation been investigated from a rigorous, ethical standpoint, nor have answers been provided regarding why some firms pursue exploitative approaches. By systemically contrasting economic liberalism and just prices as two divergent perspectives on supplier exploitation, we introduce a distinction of common business practice and unethical supplier exploitation. Since supplier exploitation is based on power, we elucidate several levels of power as antecedents and investigate the role of ethical climate as a moderator. This study extends Victor and Cullen’s (1988) ethical climate matrix according to a supply chain dimension and is summarized in an integrated, conceptual model of five propositions for future theory testing. Results provide a frame of reference for executives and scholars, who can now delineate unethical exploitation and understand important antecedents of the phenomenon better.
Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8452075fd0e8ff95e6a2ae6125725cdf37e1e98c
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In Information Systems and Management
In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Conflict Minerals and Supply Chain Due Diligence: An Exploratory Study of Multi-tier Supply Chains (2017, background): “Power imbalances and different degrees of mutual dependencies are prerequisites for exploitative scenarios (Schleper et al. 2015) and far from being equally distributed in corporate practice (Nyaga et al.”