The Adaptive Automotive Supplier: Integrating Governance Theories and Contemporary Risk Profiles

Automotive suppliers are facing disruptions from vehicle electrification, software-defined vehicle architectures and geopolitical fragmentation and regionalization. This article integrates five pillars of management thinking (transaction cost economics, agency theory, game theory, global value chain theory and platform ecosystem theory) explaining how these pressures transform OEM's supplier governance for 423 articles published from 2010 to 2026. The findings suggest that supplier management literature mostly focuses on supply chain and strategic risks and that there is a severe shortage of implementation specificity: instead of providing a specific set of organizational capabilities, studies mostly outline risks or potential coping strategies. The study frames supplier adaptation to global transformations as a compound governance problem and outlines a staged agenda, encompassing sensing and diagnosing existing risks, adopting a governance response and developing their capabilities for ensuring strategic significance within the global automotive OEM network considering asymmetric bargaining power in the setting of persistent volatility.