Collaboration behavioural factors for sustainable agri-food supply chains: A systematic review

3 Meaningful collaboration among heterogeneous stakeholders is essential for achieving sustainability in agri-food supply chains. A substantial amount of research has been focused on examining factors that are critical in shaping characteristics and effectiveness of collaboration in sustainable supply chains from various perspectives. The divergence of such studies and their findings, however, has led to a great proliferation of collaboration behavioural factors proposed. As much as contributing to understanding, different terms and definitions of similar concepts or nature introduced in the literature often also add too much confusion of agri-food supply chain stakeholders in interpreting, evaluating and improving collaboration behaviour. So far, there is lack of a structured analysis on commonalities among those behavioural factors to cluster or consolidate for enhanced clarity and efficiency in assessing and managing collaboration performance toward sustainable agri-food supply chains. Aimed to address such a limitation, this paper applies a systematic review to investigate the landscape of extant literature via the lenses of Resource Dependency Theory and Content Analysis. As a result, 10 key behavioural factors to enable an effective collaboration system for sustainable agri-food supply chain management are identified, which are Joint Efforts, Sharing Activities, Collaboration Value, Adaptation, Trust, Commitment, Power, Continuous Improvement, Coordination and Stability. The findings from this study can be used as a guideline for future research in agri-food supply chain collaboration and help to model and measure collaboration performance more effectively and efficiently.