Knowledge that Transforms

Abstract Numerous studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) indicate that firms adopt CSR practices for various reasons related to their supply chain. However, the necessity to conform to a firm's own industry CSR norm is overlooked. Conforming to one's industry CSR norm—a herding behavior known as CSR conformity —ensures firm in‐group legitimacy and preserves internal resources for core business activities. On the other hand, deviating from industry norms sets a firm apart from its peers, making the firm more appealing to supply chain partners. Motivated by this dilemma, this study draws on middle‐status conformity theory and explores how a firm's network prominence determines its CSR conformity. Panel data analyses of 1650 firm‐year observations reveal an inverse U‐shaped relationship between firm network prominence and its CSR conformity, indicating that firms with a mid‐level network prominence engage in higher CSR conformity. However, the inverse U is flattened when a firm's supply chain partners (and their respective industries) share similar CSR standards, suggesting that a firm can only prioritize its own industry CSR norms if its supply chain partners share a compatible CSR standard. These findings highlight the importance of understanding CSR from an organizational conformity perspective, especially in the context of supply chain network.

AbstractGeopolitical conflicts, particularly economic ones, introduce significant uncertainties into the global supply chain. The impact of these conflicts on cross‐border buyer–supplier transactions remains underexplored, as does the capability of global suppliers to mitigate such risks by locking in their foreign buyers. Employing a combined perspective of resource dependence theory and transaction cost economics, we examine a natural experiment to investigate the effects of the 2018 U.S.–China trade war on the transactional relationships between Chinese suppliers and their U.S. buyers. Our study reveals that the trade war generally adversely affected these buyer–supplier transactional relationships, leading to a negative abnormal transaction value in the affected dyads, which amounted to 18.42% of their pre‐event level. However, we find that this adverse impact can be attenuated when Chinese suppliers demonstrate superior innovation capabilities, higher corporate social responsibility performance, or fewer local political ties. These findings yield insights for international suppliers and buyers on strategies to maintain buyer–supplier transactions and minimize the detrimental effects on global supply chain relationships during geopolitical conflicts.

AbstractOne important question in public‐private (PP) projects is how to manage coopetition—simultaneous cooperation and competition among project members. Prior studies on the governance of PP projects showed the importance of governance mechanisms to deal with major events such as technical or organizational disruptions but paid limited attention to the management of coopetition. At the same time, research on the management of coopetition mostly focused on industrial coopetition, whereas PP projects also entail public‐private coopetition. Seeking to better understand how governance mechanisms may help manage coopetition in PP projects, we conducted an in‐depth study of Galileo—a large PP project aimed at delivering Europe's own satellite‐based navigation system. The findings show how three core aspects of project governance—(i) mechanisms (joint vs. separate use of contractual and relational mechanisms), (ii) form (lead organization vs. shared governance), and (iii) goals (to promote cooperation and/or prevent competition)—jointly explained the emergence and (mis)management of knowledge‐ and value‐related coopetitive tensions. In turn, these tensions prompted a series of adaptations in the governance of the project. Our study contributes to a co‐evolutionary understanding of the governance of PP projects and offers implications for practitioners seeking to (re)design PP project governance.

AbstractMany antecedents identified as essential to supply chain resilience (SCR) are often studied independently, without considering their synergistic effects. Based on a case study and resource orchestration theory, this article focuses on configurations of different antecedents regarding supply chain integration and big data analytics capability to develop proactive and reactive SCR. Using survey data from 277 Chinese manufacturing firms, we consider three dimensions of supply chain integration, information integration, operational integration and relational integration, and three dimensions of big data analytics capability, technical skills, managerial skills and data driven‐decision culture, and conduct fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore antecedent configurations generating high proactive and reactive SCR. We find that multiple antecedent configurations can achieve high SCR and configurations for high proactive and reactive SCR are not identical, which may involve alternative effects across different antecedents. We further implement propensity score matching analysis and reveal that firms following these configurations for high SCR also have better economic and operational performance. Moreover, we check the robustness of findings by using secondary data and attributes analysis with machine learning. This article complements and extends existing SCR literature from the configurational perspective and provides practical insights for managers to build SCR.

AbstractWe focus on two of the many sources of uncertainty in healthcare operations, mix uncertainty – the variation in the complexity of care required by the patient mix, and volume uncertainty – the variation in the volume of care demanded by the patient population. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, we study the impact of mix and volume uncertainties on two important healthcare outcomes, length of stay and number of procedures, along with the mitigation impacts of the operational concepts of related focus and utilization levels. Based on large dataset of 830,853 patient discharges in 26 clinical departments across 731 hospitals in five U.S. Midwest states, our results indicate that mix and volume uncertainties each have a significant impact on patient care. We also find that related focus and department utilization levels have a mitigating effect on uncertainty in healthcare settings. Lastly, we find considerable heterogeneity in the effects of uncertainty across hospital types and departments. We discuss key research and managerial implications of our findings.

AbstractThis study examines how inventory slack at first‐ and second‐tier suppliers influences buyer performance following an upstream disruption event. We analyze secondary data from buyer, first‐tier, and second‐tier triads impacted at their upper end by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. By matching buyers in affected triads with similar, largely unaffected firms, we assess post‐event performance in relation to triad inventory slack. Results show: (a) inventory slack at the first and second tiers supports buyer performance after the disruption; (b) first‐tier inventory slack has a greater impact; (c) buyers with less inventory slack can extract more value from their chains' inventories compared to those with more slack; and (d) first‐tier suppliers occupy a pivotal role in bridging the second‐tier inventories to the buyer. When competition for the first‐tier intensifies, the benefits of having first‐ and second‐tier inventory slack diminish for the buyer. A central contribution of this study is to highlight the importance of resources controlled by chain members with indirect links to the buyer and the bridging role of first‐tier suppliers. These insights suggest that for effective risk management, both direct and indirect supply chain resources and their interactions need consideration. Practically, these findings should guide supplier selection, risk management, and investments in supply chain visibility.

AbstractDespite the operational nature of enterprise system (ES) implementation and use, individual employees or work groups may deploy technology workarounds to circumvent inflexibility in or obstacles to using the ES. However, our understanding of the multilevel nature of technology workarounds and their performance implications remains limited. Drawing upon the multilevel theory of system usage and adaptive structuration theory, the current study examines the conditions under which group technology workarounds affect group performance, individual technology workarounds, and individual performance. Based on two studies with different research designs, we find that group technology workarounds have distinctive effects on short‐ and on long‐term group performance. Specifically, while the impact of group technology workarounds on group performance is significantly positive in the short term, such effect diminishes over time. System failure and competition intensity strengthen the positive effect of group technology workarounds on short‐term performance, whereas system failure and task nonroutineness lessen the negative effect of group technology workarounds on long‐term performance. Our study further confirms the multilevel nature of technology workarounds, finding that group technology workarounds can influence individual technology workarounds and thereby individual performance. Our results support the view that technology workarounds as a group action should be considered alongside individual technology workarounds, as well as their positive and negative effects on both group and individual performance, in both the short‐ and long‐term.

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic has created significant disruptions in both demand and supply. Our study makes use of such dramatic changes in demand and supply during the pandemic to examine resource dependence and power balancing/unbalancing issues in buyer–supplier relationships. Specifically, we investigate the effect of customer and supplier concentrations on firm resilience during the pandemic. Drawing on resource‐dependence theory (RDT), we theorize that shifts in demand and supply in different pandemic stages influence the effect of customer and supplier concentrations on firm resilience by altering the power dynamics between focal firms and their concentrated customers and suppliers. Central to our theorizing is that the worsening power imbalance is more detrimental. Measuring firm resilience by loss and recovery (i.e., change) in productivity, our analysis of 23,440 Chinese listed firms' quarter observations from 2019 to 2020 shows that customer concentration is negatively related to firm resilience in the disruption stage but has no effect in the restoration stage. Supplier concentration is positively related to firm resilience in the disruption stage but undermines firm resilience in the restoration stage. These findings largely confirm our theoretical propositions. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications.

AbstractInadequate nurse staffing continues to challenge healthcare delivery in the United States. In this research, we undertake a fine‐grained, unit‐level analysis to understand the relationships between nurse staffing, nurse turnover, and pressure ulcers, the latter of which is a key nursing‐sensitive care quality indicator. We examine these relationships within two types of hospital units: intensive care units (ICUs) and medical‐surgical (MedSurg) units, which have unique patient mixes and needs. Using hospital unit‐level data between 2008 and 2017, we show that nurse staffing primarily affects nurse turnover in ICUs, and that the adverse effects of nurse turnover on care quality tend to be stronger in ICUs than in MedSurg units. These findings provide important theoretical insights into the varying roles of staffing, turnover, and quality across organizational units. The findings suggest that hospital administrators may prioritize staffing needs for ICUs over MedSurg units to maintain strong quality performance on measures such as pressure ulcers. Further, our study reveals that staffing requirements for ICUs may be inadequate compared with MedSurg units. Thus, there is a need to evaluate existing guidelines on ICU staffing.