Research Insights: Share and share alike?

Buyer firms, under pressure from multiple stakeholders to improve their environmental performance, often seek support from external partners such as suppliers. They can achieve this by encouraging collaboration among competing suppliers in a form of cooperation commonly referred to as supplier coopetition consortiums. The challenge: how best to foster this supplier-to-supplier environmental knowledge sharing, especially when competitors are wary of sharing expertise.

Laharish Guntuka, assistant professor in the department of management, explores this topic in a co-authored article, “An experimental investigation of environmental knowledge sharing in a supply chain coopetition situation,” published in the International Journal of Operations & Production Management.

Based on the coopetition literature, Guntuka and his collaborators developed a model and tested it using an online vignette-based experiment administered to 201 supply chain managers, to examine how a buyer can influence a supplier representative’s willingness to share environmental knowledge with a rival supplier. They contextualized their results using insights from interviews with senior managers representing firms operating in a broad array of industries.

The researchers found that a supplier representative’s personal environmental values influence their commitment to an environmental consortium with a rival firm, and they are subsequently willing to share proprietary environmental knowledge. In turn, these relationships are moderated by situational factors including competitive intensity and buyer power. 

Gutunka’s study has several practical implications. Among these, buyers should consider a supplier representative’s personal environmental values when selecting firms to participate in an environmental consortium. They should also recognize how industry competition can diminish the extent to which personal environmental values result in commitment to a consortium. Finally, the authors recommend managers of buyer firms use expert rather than coercive power to foster commitment to a consortium.

View paper in the International Journal of Operations & Production Management (2025), An experimental investigation of environmental knowledge sharing in a supply chain coopetition situation.