David E. Cantor

Purpose: The persistence of remote and hybrid work has resulted in socially isolated supply chain workers working in functional groups to perform sometimes repetitive and unengaging tasks, under the auspices of performance dashboards. This study examines perseverance, a personality trait that may be a potential factor in stimulating helping behavior and improving workgroup performance. In addition, we also explore common logistics and supply chain management task structures, including goal-setting and task complexity as moderating influences. Design/methodology/approach: This paper utilizes an online scenario-based vignette experiment designed in collaboration with a senior supply chain management executive to explore personality and situational factors that influence helping behavior among remote workers performing an unengaging supply chain task. Findings: We find that, while a worker's perseverance is positively related to their likelihood of helping coworkers, this direct relationship is under competitive mediation through normative ability, in which we also find that perseverant workers tend to focus more on their own performance, even though assessing their normative ability is positively tied to helping behavior. Further, both of these dynamics are respectively amplified by participative goal-setting and, unexpectedly, task complexity. Practical implications: As firms continue to struggle with return-to-office mandates, our results offer insights into how supply chain managers can improve workgroup performance among remote workers, particularly those tasked with unengaging and unrewarding tasks that remain commonplace in the logistics and supply chain management domain. Originality/value: To our best knowledge, this is the first study to examine remote supply chain worker performance. Even as technology continues to advance, there are certain repetitive and unengaging tasks that cannot be simply automated. Our study offers a potential path for supply chain managers to improve remote worker engagement and workgroup performance on these tasks.

Purpose: This study investigates how a focal firm's supply chain reputation and product launch speed influences consumer and managerial responses to focal firms' product preannouncements, emphasizing how supply chain capabilities and competitive dynamics shape market interactions. Design/methodology/approach: Using a behavioral supply chain approach, we conduct two vignette-based experiments simulating consumer and managerial decision-making within competitive smartphone market scenarios. Findings: The results highlight that perceptions about a focal firm's supply chain reputation and competitive aggressiveness in the form of product launch speed encourage consumer willingness to wait for a preannounced product. Additionally, these factors prompt rival firms' managers to leverage their supply chain capabilities for competitive actions. Originality/value: This research provides a novel integration of behavioral perspectives within supply chain management, expanding insights into how consumers and rival firms' managers respond to product preannouncements.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how and why consumers pay attention to a firm's environmentally irresponsible sourcing practices. Using signaling theory, this research develops and tests a model that examines how a firm's intentionality and motive behind irresponsible environmental sourcing practices can signal a product's environmental characteristics to consumers. The findings suggest that consumers tend to view products as more environmentally harmful when they learn that a firm intentionally sources from irresponsible suppliers. Likewise, consumers are more likely to react unfavorably to a firm's products when a firm prioritizes profit motives over responsible sourcing practices. This research also offers insight into how a firm's corrective response strategy (e.g., mandatory vs. voluntary environmental supplier actions) could mitigate the adverse impact of the firm's environmentally irresponsible sourcing practices on consumer perceptions of environmental risk. The findings indicate that a firm's mandatory corrective actions targeted to its suppliers are more likely to be effective, whereas voluntary actions were found to be ineffective. Two experiments were conducted to test the study's hypotheses. Managerial and societal implications are also discussed.

Purpose: 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.Design/methodology/approach: An online vignette experiment and a hybrid discrete event and agent-based simulation model are used.Findings: Study findings demonstrate how a non-core worker's perception of team dynamics influence engagement in helping behavior and system performance.Originality/value: 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.

Purpose: The purpose of our study is to investigate how a manufacturing plant’s internal operations along with its network of connections (upstream and downstream) can have an impact on its recovery time from a disruption. The authors also examine the inverse-U impact of complexity. Finally, the authors test the moderating role that business continuity management plans (BCP) at the plant level have on recovery time.Design/methodology/approach: To test our hypotheses, the authors partnered with Resilinc Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based provider of supply chain risk management solutions to identify focal firms’ suppliers, customers and plant-level data including information on parts, manufacturing activities, bill of materials, alternate sites and formal business continuity plans. The authors employed censored data regression technique (Tobit).Findings: Several important findings reveal that the plant’s internal operations and network connections impact recovery time. Specifically, the number of parts manufactured at the plant as well as the number of internal plant processes significantly increase disruption recovery time. In addition, the number of supply chains (upstream and downstream) involving the plant as well as the echelon distance of the plant from its original equipment manufacturer significantly increase recovery time. The authors also find that there exists an inverted-U relationship between complexity and recovery time. Finally, the authors find partial support that BCP will have a negative moderating effect between complexity and recovery time.Originality/value: This research highlights gaps in the literature related to supply chain disruption and recovery. There is a need for more accurate methods to measure recovery time, more research on recovery at the supply chain site level and further analysis of the impact of supply chain complexity on recovery time.

There is mixed evidence on the effectiveness of voluntary environmental programs. We evaluate a voluntary program aimed at reducing transportation emissions, that is, the U.S. EPA SmartWay Program. We construct a novel database of the physical assets used by firms before and after they joined SmartWay and compare changes in the age of their assets with that of firms that did not join SmartWay. Our results show that firms that participated in SmartWay operate substantially newer (i.e., cleaner) trucks compared with non‐SmartWay participants, indicating that SmartWay participation is a credible signal of a firm's reduced emissions footprint emanating from truck operations. After the start of SmartWay, firms that joined invested in newer trucks relative to firms that did not, with about a year reduction in average truck age several years after the program began. SmartWay had a larger effect on firms that own their trucks compared with firms that outsource ownership, and sustained participation increased the program's effectiveness. We estimate that the SmartWay Program has reduced commercial transportation emissions from operations by 25.2 million metric tons of CO₂ by increasing the incentive to invest in newer, cleaner trucks. Our study provides insight into factors that make voluntary environmental programs effective.

Purpose: This study aims to examine the extent to which a buying firm can leverage the firm's supplier's innovations to boost the firm's own innovation performance and key moderators to this relationship. Grounded in social embeddedness theory, the authors explore the role of dyadic embeddedness between a buyer and supplier as a facilitator of buyer innovation.Design/methodology/approach: Negative binomial regression was used to empirically analyze a large sample of dyadic observations from the USA manufacturing industry. Measures were developed from data acquired from Compustat, LexisNexis and Bloomberg.Findings: The findings indicate that supplier innovation has a positive impact on a buyer firm's innovation output, particularly when the firms are technically similar and when there is a higher degree of financial interdependence in the buyer–supplier dyad.Originality/value: This study provides important insights into how supplier firms can facilitate buyer innovation as and how relational factors suggested by social embeddedness theory act to strengthen this effect. Through a theoretical-based empirical examination of supply chain dyads, the findings highlight the importance of financial interdependence and technical similarity when buyers seek to benefit from supplier innovation capabilities.