| Intense foreign competition and more demanding customers have increased interest in a critical aspect of supply management: how sharing market knowledge with members of a supply network leads to better customer responsiveness for a focal firm. Leveraging latent knowledge available in the supply network is a critical source of customer responsiveness. Conversely, customer responsiveness has been touted as one the most important capabilities for a firm to thrive in the current competitive landscape. This research develops a framework that postulates how a focal firm can leverage the knowledge latent in its supply network, thereby improving its capability to achieve responsiveness to its final customers. The framework is theoretically grounded in the social network theory, information processing theory, and supply management literature. The study utilizes empirical scaling procedures and survey-based methodologies. The causal relationships hypothesized in the conceptual framework are examined and tested using structural equation modeling. The results demonstrate that strategic sourcing has a direct and positive impact on the ability of a firm to gather knowledge available in a supply network. Similarly strategic sourcing impacts positively the ability of a focal firm to embed its interactions with suppliers in a social context, positively affecting the motivation to search more frequently for knowledge. The results also demonstrate that networking processes, preceded by strategic sourcing, lead to customer responsiveness. These overarching results extend our current understanding of how a focal firm can benefit from the knowledge latent in a supply network, advancing prescriptions of how to achieve customer responsiveness. |
