Leveraging IT resources, embeddedness, and dependence: A supplier's perspective on appropriating benefits with powerful buyers

• Supplier–buyer relationships often exhibit power differentials and dependence.
• Relation-specific IT, embeddedness and dependence lead to supplier benefits.
• Embeddedness does not result in a supplier appropriating benefits.
• A supplier must use a buyer's dependence on a supplier to appropriate benefits.

The relationships between suppliers and buyers are often simultaneously characterized by power differentials and dependence. In such relationships, a powerful buyer is able to benefit more from the relationship than the supplier. We examine how a supplier can strengthen its use of relation-specific information technology (IT) with embeddedness to appropriate its share of relational benefits. We developed and tested a model of supplier relation-specific IT use, embeddedness, and buyer's dependence on a supplier. The results showed that embeddedness did not lead directly to the sharing of relational benefits; the appropriation of relational benefits is instead derived from buyer dependence.