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

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lashley, Kisha; Pollock, Timothy G.
• 署名单位: University of Virginia; University of Tennessee System; University of Tennessee Knoxville
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2019.1353
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 1313-1335
• 关键词: buyer-supplier relationships; cognitive centrality; hard power; Influencers; minority businesses; women-owned businesses; POWER; soft power; supplier diversity

摘要

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. Weexamine 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.