The effects of Distributive, Procedural, and interactional Justice on Digitally Enabled Supply Chain Integration: an upper Echelons Perspective

Firms are increasingly engaged in digitally enabled supply chain integration (DeSCI) with their supply chain partners to leverage each other’s resources and capabilities for achieving competitive advantage. However, how the top management’s perceptions of justice and behaviors in the supply chain influence the DeSCI are not well understood. Drawing upon the upper echelons theory, we investigate how top management mediates the impact of justice on firm’s DeSCI. Specifically, we identify three types of justice (distributive, procedural, and interactional justice) that influence top management behaviors (top management belief and top management participation), which in turn affect DeSCI (digitally enabled information sharing and digitally enabled collaborative planning). We test the hypotheses of interest with data collected from 198 firms in China. Our findings reveal that procedural justice positively affects top management belief, which then positively affects top management participation. In turn, top management participation positively affects both digitally enabled information sharing and digitally enabled collaborative planning. Furthermore, we find interactional justice postitively affects top management participation without the mediation of top management belief. However, we do not find distributive justice significantly relates to top management belief or top management participation. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications of this study are discussed.