Relational governance and opportunism in logistics outsourcing relationships: empirical evidence from China

Abstract

Logistics outsourcing is prevalent in today's business world as a strategy to obtain competitive advantages. As in other relational exchanges, it is imperative to understand how to alleviate opportunistic behaviour in logistics outsourcing relationships. Using China's burgeoning logistics industry as a backdrop, and drawing on social exchange and transaction cost theories, this study examines how relational norms and trust mitigate opportunistic behaviour and how environmental uncertainty moderates the effects of norms and trust from logistics users’ perspective. Employing data collected from 119 manufacturing and service firms in China, we empirically test the proposed model and find that trust and norms are effective safeguards in reducing the opportunistic behaviour of logistics service providers, particularly in highly uncertain environments.

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