The Impact Of Organizational Antecedents On A Firm's Supply Chain Agility

Today's marketplace is characterized by intense competitive pressures as well as high levels of turbulence and uncertainty. Organizations require agility in their supply chains to provide superior value as well as to manage disruption risks and ensure uninterrupted service to customers. Thus the cultivation of agility is approached as a risk management initiative that enables a firm to respond rapidly to marketplace changes, as well as anticipated and actual disruptions in the supply chain. Agility is of value for both risk mitigation and response. As the most important branch of manufacturing, supply chain in chemical industrial requires more the stability than average due to its special characters of industrial. Due to the development trend of supply chain management in chemical industry, flexible has been insufficient to account for the supply chain agility. Firms need to adopt internal integration and external integration to improve supply chain agility, ensure the company to respond to market uncertainties.Currently research on supply chain agility mainly focused on the operation management direction, from the perspective of supply and demand balance, there is little studies on company cultural antecedents and organizational practices influencing the supply chain agility. This research investigates the impact of one cultural antecedent (market orientation), and three organizational practices of internal integration, external integration with key suppliers and customers, and external flexibility, and eventually impact the firm's supply chain agility, which may provide some help or reference for the firms in the chemical industrial on how to improve supply chain agility.A questionnaire survey has been conducted in this research paper, as well as a structural equation model, to implement empirical research on the influence factors of organizational antecedents of Firm's Supply Chain Agility. The results show that the internal/external integration and flexibly context as a factor which to establish agility in supply chain.