공급망에서의 윤리적 가치특성과 거래공정성 - 구매담당자의 비윤리적 의사결정이 거래공정성과 물류성과에 미치는 영향 -

According to the theory of justice, ethical decision-making by business organizations is the basis of the development of inter-organizational transactional justice. Several studies have proved that transactional justice affects supply chain management because it creates inter-firm trust and long-term collaborative relationships between supply chain partners. Consequently, ethics and transactional justice probably improve the performance of supply chains as well as the operational efficiency of the component firms. The primary purpose of this empirical study is to discover the meaningful causes of purchasing managers’ unethical decision-making in supply-chain transactions. These are identified from a few philosophical concepts: ethics, morality, and virtue. Managers’ unethical decision-making might ruin transactional justice between supply chain partner companies as well, and as such, the study uses a theoretical structural model to investigate the causal impact of purchasing managers’ unethical supply-chain decision-making behaviors on both transactional justice and logistics performance. Moreover, the study attempts to prove the relationships between transaction justice and logistics performance, which might represent the overall operational performance of both the component firms and the supply-chain as a whole. That is, the structural causal relationships among managers’ ethical levels, transactional justice, and logistics performance are tested in this research. In doing so, the study attempts to prove that purchasing managers’ ethical approaches to their business partners and the consequential transactional justice affect supply chain management as firms seek continued collaborative relationships with business partners. In this study, the factors explaining the reasons for managers’ unethical business decisions include the justifiability factor (i.e., oughtness or philosophical Sollen) and the pragmatism factor (i.e., practicalness or practicality). The justifiability factor includes the ethical dimensions of justice, deontology, and egoism. The pragmatism factor includes the ethical dimensions of utilitarianism and relativism. The study reveals that the justifiability factor has a significant negative impact on firm logistics performance but has no impact on transactional justice. Meanwhile, the pragmatism factor has a significant effect on transactional justice but has no impact on logistics performance. This implies that a manager’s unethical decision-making behaviors stemming from disregard for fairness, consideration for business partners, or fulfillment of social contract, might ruin firm performance. On the other hand, a manager’s unethical decision-making caused by overweight preference for the consequential effect, efficiency improvements, or profit maximization, might worsen transactional justice with business partners. Therefore, firms need to balance the justifiability factor and the practicality factor when making ethical decisions. Such an approach is likely to improve transactional justice, the firms’ business performance, and the collaborative relationships with suppliers.