Purpose

Firms are increasingly required to make ethical choices when selecting suppliers for their supply chains, and the decisions often rest on individual purchasing managers within the firm. This study builds on the literature on ethical decision-making and the concept of decision frames to investigate the decision-making process of purchasing managers in financially distressed firms. Codes of Conduct (CoC) and how they are enforced (financial rewards and codified procedures for oversight) are studied in terms of their effectiveness in informing and guiding purchasing managers in their supplier selection decisions.

Design/methodology/approach

Four sequential experiments were conducted with a total of 648 purchasing managers from manufacturing firms.

Findings

The results indicate that purchasing managers in firms facing financial distress are more than four times more likely than purchasing managers in the control groups to select the less ethical supplier in favor of better operational performance. As a potential remedy, it is found that enforcing the firm's CoC help to counteract this tendency and increase ethical supplier selection decisions by 2.1- to 2.6-fold. However, CoC enforcement that invokes multiple conflicting decision frames simultaneously is more likely to impair than promote ethical supplier selection decisions, compared to situations where only one enforcement method is present.

Originality/value

These findings develop an improved understanding of purchasers' decision-making processes and shed light on how to effectively use CoCs to guide these decisions.

中文翻译：

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破解密码：行为准则和决策框架对陷入财务困境的企业选择供应商的影响

目的

企业在为其供应链选择供应商时，越来越需要做出符合道德的选择，而这些决定往往取决于公司内部的个别采购经理。本研究以道德决策和决策框架概念的文献为基础，研究财务困境企业采购经理的决策过程。行为准则 (CoC) 及其执行方式（财务奖励和成文的监督程序）在通知和指导采购经理做出供应商选择决策方面的有效性进行了研究。

设计/方法论/途径

对来自制造企业的总共 648 名采购经理进行了四次连续实验。

发现

结果表明，面临财务困境的公司的采购经理选择道德较差的供应商以实现更好的运营绩效的可能性是对照组采购经理的四倍多。作为一种潜在的补救措施，我们发现强制执行公司的 CoC 有助于抵消这种趋势，并将道德供应商选择决策提高 2.1 至 2.6 倍。然而，与仅存在一种执行方法的情况相比，同时调用多个相互冲突的决策框架的 CoC 执行更有可能损害而不是促进道德供应商选择决策。

原创性/价值

这些发现加深了对购买者决策过程的理解，并揭示了如何有效地使用 CoC 来指导这些决策。