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Swift trust and commitment: The missing links for humanitarian supply chain coordination?

  • Applications of OR in Disaster Relief Operations
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Abstract

Coordination among actors in a humanitarian relief supply chain decides whether a relief operation can be or successful or not. In humanitarian supply chains, due to the urgency and importance of the situation combined with scarce resources, actors have to coordinate and trust each other in order to achieve joint goals. This paper investigated empirically the role of swift trust as mediating variable for achieving supply chain coordination. Based on commitment-trust theory we explore enablers of swift-trust and how swift trust translates into coordination through commitment. Based on a path analytic model we test data from the National Disaster Management Authority of India. Our study is the first testing commitment-trust theory in the humanitarian context, highlighting the importance of swift trust and commitment for much thought after coordination. Furthermore, the study shows that information sharing and behavioral uncertainty reduction act as enablers for swift trust. The study findings offer practical guidance and suggest that swift trust is a missing link for the success of humanitarian supply chains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Montpellier Business School, Montpellier Research in Management, 2300 Avenue des Moulins, 34185, Montpellier, France

    Rameshwar Dubey

  2. DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

    Nezih Altay

  3. School of Business Management and Economics, University of Sussex, Sussex House, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK

    Constantin Blome

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  1. Rameshwar Dubey
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Correspondence to Rameshwar Dubey.

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Dubey, R., Altay, N. & Blome, C. Swift trust and commitment: The missing links for humanitarian supply chain coordination?. Ann Oper Res 283, 159–177 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2676-z

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