Justice in supply chain relationships: A comprehensive review and future research directions

Abstract

Copyright © European Academy of Management (EURAM) 2022. All Rights Reserved. This paper aims to assess the current status of research on inter-organisational justice in supply chain relationships (SCRs), analyse its key themes and develop future research directions to advance the knowledge of SCRs. The study employed a rigorous review methodology that combined systematic and snowballing searches. In total, 98 papers published in peer-reviewed journals between 1983 and 2020 were identified and have been descriptively and thematically analysed. Through synthesising and integrating the extant research, the study develops a taxonomy of types of inter-organisational justice in SCRs (i.e., relationship overall justice, relationship dimensional-based justice, event overall justice and event dimensional-based justice). The review also identifies and discusses three main themes (and subthemes) of the existing research, including antecedents (i.e., governance mechanism, governance design, breach of contract and relationship power), outcomes (i.e., attitudinal, behavioural and performance) and boundary conditions (i.e., relationship and environmental) of inter-organisational justice in SCRs. The study concludes by identifying current gaps and suggesting important research directions for further work.