The Impact of Ethical Dissonance on Performance in Inter-Firm Relationships

초록

This paper defines ethical dissonance as the gap between the encoded ethical values of a firm and its managers’ perception of the firm’s actual ethical level, and investigates its impact on trust, collaborative activities, and logistics efficiency in inter-firm relationships. The main research survey included 1,016 questionnaires distributed between October 2011 and April 2012. Managers of large purchasing firms were asked to complete the survey with specific consideration to tasks and relationships held with all of their subcontractor partners. In total, 262 responses were collected. The findings indicate that ethical dissonance negatively affects two trust factors: affective trust and competency-based trust. When managers from supplier firms detect ethical dissonance in buyer firms, they might feel uncertainty in business transactions, which situation erodes mutual trust. Both trust factors have a positive impact on two collaboration factors: task-solving involvement and information sharing. On the other hand, competency-based trust does not affect collaboration in terms of rapport building. Collaboration through task-solving involvement contributes to logistics-efficiency improvement, whereas collaboration through information sharing and rapport building does not.

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