Antecedents And Performance Effect Of Supply Chain Integration:an External Relationship View

Within intensified competition and rapidly changing business settings,supply chain integration has become the major means to cope with environmental changes and maintain competitive advantages.Supply chain integration refers to the extent to which a firm collaborates with major suppliers and customers to manage inter-organizational business processes.However,the effect of supply chain integration on firm performance,especially organizational agility,remains inconsistent in existing research.It is necessary to explore the impact of supply chain integration on firm performance.Furthermore,existing supply chain integration research mainly focuses on the performance effect of supply chain integration and ignores its antecedents.From the perspective of external relationships,this research attempts to explore how a firm leverages top managers' informal managerial ties and formal supply chain relationship structure to facilitate supply chain integration.The current research proposes the following three studies.Study 1 focuses on the influence of supply chain integration.Study 1 explores the influencing mechanism of the supply chain-based IT integration,a specific type of supply chain integration,on organizational agility.Grounded on dynamic capability theory as well as the capability hierarchy view,Study 1 examines the mediating role of higher-order absorptive capacity on the relationship between lower-order supply chain-based IT integration and organizational agility.Meanwhile,Study 1 explores the moderating role of market turbulence on the relationship between supply chain-based IT integration and absorptive capacity.Study 1 also analyzes the impact of the supply chain-based IT reconfiguration on organizational agility.Study 2 and Study 3 focus on the antecedents of supply chain integration.Study 2 emphasizes on top manager's informal managerial ties and explores the impact of managerial ties on supply chain integration and financial performance.Grounded on social capital theory,Study 2 proposes that managerial ties could act as social capital and improve supply chain integration and market turbulence could moderate the influence of managerial ties on supply chain integration.Study 2 further examines the direct impact of supply chain integration on financial performance.Study 3 explores the impact of supply chain concentration on supply chain integration and organizational agility from the perspective of formal supply chain relationship structure.Based on the structural embeddedness perspective,Study 3 proposes that supply chain concentration could influence supply chain integration and environmental turbulence moderates the above influence.Study 3 also explores the direct impact of supply chain integration on organizational agility.This research contributes to the existing literature in four main ways:First,this research enriches existing research on the influencing mechanism of supply chain integration on organizational agility.The relationship between supply chain integration and firm performance,especially organizational agility,remains controversial.This research focuses on the impact of the supply chain-based IT integration on organizational agility.Based on the dynamic capability theory and the capability hierarchy view,this research finds that absorptive capacity mediates the relationship between supply chain-based IT integration and organizational agility.This research further empirically examines the direct impact of supply chain integration on financial performance and organizational agility.Second,this research enriches the existing literature on the antecedents of supply chain integration from the perspective of informal managerial ties.Although existing studies have theoretically proposed the possible impact of managerial ties on supply chain relationships,seldom empirical studies verify such impact.Additionally,existing research mainly focuses on the role of business ties in supply chain management and ignores the possible impact of political ties.Based on social capital theory,this study empirically tests the impact of managerial ties on supply chain integration.Third,this research expands the research on the antecedent of supply chain integration from the perspective of formal supply chain relationship structure.Existing literature has noticed the impact of supply chain relationship structure and theoretically proposes the possible impact of supply chain concentration on supply chain integration.However,limited empirical studies have examined such impact.Additionally,even though these exist differences in the content of information and power dynamics in the upstream and downstream supply chain relationships,existing studies seldom distinguish the differences between the impact of supplier concentration and customer concentration.Based on the structural embeddedness perspective,this study simultaneously examines the impact of supplier concentration and customer concentration on supply chain integration.Fourth,this research explores the moderating effect of the external environment on the relationship between supply chain integration and its antecedents.Although a firm can improve supply chain integration through some management practices,the roles of these practices are often affected by the external environment.Although managerial ties and supply chain concentration could affect supply chain integration,the boundary conditions remain largely unexplored.This research examines the moderating role of environmental turbulence on the relationship between antecedent variables and supply chain integration.This research further deepens existing research on the formation process of supply chain integration.