Supplier development adoption: A conceptual model for triple bottom line (TBL) outcomes

Abstract Suppliers play an important and strategic role in the supply chain as they are critical providers of inputs to other supply chain members. Sustainable supplier development is key to improve suppliers' sustainability capabilities and it is highly effective to provide a sustainable supply chain. Supplier development for Triple Bottom Line (TBL) outcomes is a relatively new topic in the literature and lacks both academic and managerial expertise on the subject. Understanding the triple bottom line supplier development strategies that should be adopted to improve suppliers' sustainable results is critical to improve sustainability across the supply chain. Thus, the overarching goal of this research is to provide an overview of the TBL supplier development practices aiming to investigate the primary strategies that can deliver triple bottom line outcomes. Thus, a systematic literature review was conducted, and data analysis was performed based on content analysis, with an inductive category building approach. The qualitative software, QDA Miner, supported the literature analysis. The results of this paper include: (i) TBL supplier development practices are categorized into managerial, evaluation and technical aiming to reflect the different nature of TBL supplier development; (ii) implications of these categories in TBL supplier development are illustrated according to their effectiveness, organizational criteria and risks; (iii) a conceptual model that supports TBL supplier development implementation that reflects both the buying organization's and the suppliers' perspective in the process is proposed; (iv) a research agenda is developed, delineating the main research gaps that need to be covered and guiding opportunities for future research.