The Effects of Buyers' Attitudes Toward Supplier Diversity on Their Spending with Ethnic Minority Businesses

This study examines characteristics that may influence buyers' desire to obtain goods and services from ethnic minority enterprises using data from 277 buyers employed at large buying organizations (LPOs) in the United States and the United Kingdom (EMBs). The literature on social capital is utilized to construct hypotheses about the cognitive, structural, and relational factors that may influence decisions to purchase from minority enterprises. Following that, current discrimination theory is used to deduce how buyers' views about supplier diversity affect the effects of social capital on their buying operations with EMBs. Multiple regression research indicates that in both the United States and the United Kingdom, buyers' perceived positive social capital has a direct, substantial association with their spending with EMBs. Additionally, the findings indicate that in both nations, purchasers' attitudes toward supplier diversity act as a moderator of the connection. Interestingly, despite the fact that the United States pioneered the concept of supplier variety, our study reveals that UK LPO buyers spend more with their EMBs. This research demonstrates how LPOs' strategic corporate social responsibility initiatives may be influenced by their buyers' social relationships with EMBs and their views about supplier diversity, based on these findings.

Dancing with Giants: How Small Women- and Minority-Owned Firms Use Soft Power to Manage Asymmetric Relationships with Larger Partners

We explore how minority- and women-owned suppliers lacking hard power manage asymmetric relationships with larger, more powerful buyers in the context of supplier diversity relationships. We examine how these suppliers create and use soft power to manage the opportunities and challenges they encounter trying to maintain their positions in large buyers’ supply chains. We find that these easily substitutable firms use a variety of information sources to identify and make themselves cognitively central to individuals inside and outside the buyer organizations who can serve as functional and political influencers. They then employ these influencers to affect the buyer’s decisions when their position in the supply chain is threatened, largely without the buyer noticing. Our study contributes to the literatures on the use of soft power buyer-supplier power relationships and supplier diversity.

How Do Large Purchasing Organizations Treat Their Diverse Suppliers? Minority Business Enterprise CEOs’ Perception of Corporate Commitment to Supplier Diversity

Supplier diversity programs were created in the United States nearly 50 years ago to encourage private sector companies to provide business opportunities to underutilized minority business enterprises. In order to assess the experiences that minority business enterprise CEOs have with large purchasing organizations and their perceptions of justice and commitment of large purchasing organizations to the buyer–supplier relationship (BSR), this study utilizes survey data collected from 206 minority business enterprise CEOs who supply large purchasing organizations that espouse a strong commitment to supplier diversity. The theoretical framework of organizational justice is utilized to establish testable hypotheses. The results from hierarchical linear regression show minority business enterprise CEOs’ perception of large purchasing organizations’ commitment to the BSR is positively related to the distributive and informational dimensions of organizational justice. Surprisingly, the procedural dimension was found to have a significantly negative relationship. This research also found a significant, negative relationship between minority firm CEOs’ perception of distributive and informational justice and their perceptions of unethical behavior by large purchasing organizations.