JSCM Video: Narratives in Supplier Negotiations

Editor’s note: This video is collaboration between the Journal of Supply Chain Managementand Supply Chain Management Review. Each month, we bring SCMR readers a video interview from the pages of JSCM.

There’s an old saying that it takes two to tango. That is certainly the case when it comes to buyer-supplier negotiations, where both parties shape the relational and contractual dimensions of their collaboration. The ability o influence the other party during negotiations is therefore vital to improve performance outcomes.

In this month’s video from JOSCM, authors Lutz Kaufman Moritz Schreiner and Felix Reimann discuss their research entitled Narratives in Supplier Negotiations – The Interplay of Narrative Design Elements, Structural Power, and Outcomes.

In a two-part study, they took a configurational approach to investigate how buyers can use narratives in different power situations to influence suppliers and improve their relational and economic negotiation results. In their first study, they conducted narrative writing workshops to identify typical design elements of such narratives. In the second, they employed fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to determine how different configurations of these design elements influence narratives’ effectiveness in different power situations. For the field of supply chain management, they develop theory by introducing narratives as an additional means of influence in buyer-supplier negotiations and by examining the interplay between narrative design elements, structural power and negotiation outcomes that are specific to the buyer-supplier relationship.

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