Publications
Publications
- November–December 2020
- Organization Science
Dancing with Giants: How Small Women-and Minority- Owned Firms Use Soft Power to Manage Asymmetric Relationships with Larger Partners
By: Kisha Lashley and Timothy G. Pollock
Abstract
We explore how minority- and women-owned suppliers lacking hard power manage asymmetric relationships with larger, more powerful buyers in the context of supplier diversity relationships. We examine how these suppliers create and use soft power to manage the opportunities and challenges they encounter trying to maintain their positions in large buyers’ supply chains. We find that these easily substitutable firms use a variety of information sources to identify and make themselves cognitively central to individuals inside and outside the buyer organizations who can serve as functional and political influencers. They then employ these influencers to affect the buyer’s decisions when their position in the supply chain is threatened, largely without the buyer noticing. Our study contributes to the literatures on the use of soft power buyer-supplier power relationships and supplier diversity.
Keywords
Women-owned Businesses; Minority-owned Businesses; Soft Power; Buyer-supplier Relationshships; Cognitive Centrality; Hard Power; Influencers; Supplier Diversity; Small Business; Relationships; Sales
Citation
Lashley, Kisha, and Timothy G. Pollock. "Dancing with Giants: How Small Women-and Minority- Owned Firms Use Soft Power to Manage Asymmetric Relationships with Larger Partners." Organization Science 31, no. 6 (November–December 2020): 1313–1335.