Research On Relationship Between Control And Supply Chain Collaboration

With globalization, increasing competition and more demanding customers, the underlying notion is that firms cannot compete alone in the market. Therefore, firms look outside of their boundaries, and work with firms possessing complementary capabilities. Through supply chain collaboration, two or more firms work together and coordination with each other to achieve their goals in a competitive environment that cannot be achieved individually. Although big promises have been made, it appears that reality falls somewhat short. Opportunistic, abusive action and betray of supply chain partners are all hinder the realization of supply chain collaboration. Effective control is crucial to realize supply chain collaboration. However, the current research on the relationship and mechanism between control and supply chain collaboration is still lacking, and also not payed enough attention by researchers. In view of this, it is necessary to explore the relationship among the control, supply chain collaboration and business performance, as well as under the environmental uncertainty. This is very helpful to enrich and develop the theory of control and supply chain collaboration, and give better advice to firms.The main research innovative contents and conclusions of this dissertation are as follows:Firstly, from the perspective of service-dominant logic, a deep analysis of value and value co-creation is made, and the three roles of firm--observer, facilitator and participant are pointed. The existing research of supply chain collaboration still focuse on observer and facilitator, and lack of understanding about participant. Therefore, to truly realize value co-creation, supply chain collaboration should not only between the upstream and downstream firms, not only introduce customers into the collaborative process, but also go deep into the customer’s consumption process.And then, the research model of control, supply chain collaboration and business performance is constructed and empirical analyzed by survey data from240firms in China. The results indicate that the output control and informal control have a significant and positive effect on supply chain collaboration. Output control and informal control influence business performance by the mediator of supply chain collaboration. A further analysis of the moderation effect of firm size reveals that the output control of SMEs has significant and positive impact on supply chain collaboration, and the path coefficient is larger than that of large firms. The business performance of SMEs is significant and positive affected by supply chain collaboration, but large firms are not. In the development of firms. there is a trend from output control to the combination of output control and informal control in the choice of control.Finally, taking into account of environmental uncertainty, the relationship between control and supply chain is reanalyzed, and also the alternative or complementary relationship among different control. The results indicate that environmental uncertainty weakens effects of output control and informal control on supply chain collaboration, but does not influence the impact of behavior control on supply chain collaboration. The substitute relationship between output control and informal control is proved by data, but the complement relationship of behavior control and informal control is not.