Research has shown how individual identity may be either a burden or a supporting factor to group behavior. The issue is of relevance to business research where especially the field of supply chain management has been concerned with how relationships between supplier and buyer organizations may be facilitated. Yet, the interorganizational context has remained relatively less studied compared to the intraorganizational in terms of identity, whereas supply chain management studies have often disregarded behavioral factors. This study contributes to these shortcomings by examining how the identity types of organizational identity, collective identity and intergroup relational identity relate to commitment to supply relationships through the interaction of perceived supply disruption risk and individual risk attitude. Particularly, it is argued that individuals exhibit identity-protective cognitions and may, thus, assess risks threatening their identities as lower than others.
A moderated mediation model with the constructs identity type, perceived supply disruption risk, individual risk attitude, and commitment to supply relationship was tested by collecting data from (N=)42 business students with a scenario-based role-playing experiment. The respondents were primed with an identity and consequently surveyed with items regarding the studied constructs. The data was then analyzed with exploratory factor analysis and moderated regression analysis. The results indicate that identity type is related to perceived supply disruption risk so that when an identity among the organization or supply chain relevant to an individual decision-maker exists, they tend to perceive the risks lower. However, the type of identity was of no significance to the strength of this effect. Likewise, the assumed mechanisms of mediation and moderation were not supported by the data.
The findings show how the activation of organizational and interorganizational identities are essential in terms of organizational behavior and interorganizational relationships. On the one hand, identity may influence individual perceptions regarding other organizations. On the other hand, the identity or the perceptions do not always lead to congruent behavior. In this vein, it is possible that commitment to a relationship is more about what one commits to, than to whom. Future research could account for this and extend the presented model with more observations and concepts for better explanatory power
