TY - JOUR
T1 - Interorganizational cooperation and supplier performance in high-technology supply chains
AU - Connor, Neale O’
AU - Lowry, Paul Benjamin
AU - Treiblmaier, Horst
N1 - Funding Information:
In response to criticisms in the literature ( Van der Stede et al., 2005 ) regarding “who” completed the mail survey or who was interviewed, the interviewee vetting process was carried out personally by the first author. Because we focused on the supplier's relationship with its major downstream customer, the target interviewee was the customer relationship manager. We used an intensely personal approach to ensure that the key customer relationship manager in each supplier selected for the interview was knowledgeable about the collaborative practices of their largest manufacturing customer. To execute this ideal, the first author attended 29 B2B trade shows and went on factory visits over a two-year period to personally meet with and approve each interviewee before beginning an interview. A total of 988 interviews were conducted in Chinese and 16 were conducted in English (see Table 1 for the sample interviewees). Each interview lasted for one hour on average. We followed the steps pioneered by Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) in their large-scale interview study of over 3,000 managers. The sample population consisted of all the component companies invited to interview in each expo, and among the short-listed potential interviewees, there was over a 70% take-up rate for the request to be interviewed by the first author. Crucially, this study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee for Non-Clinical Faculties at The University of Hong Kong, reference number EA190109 on January 21, 2009, in support of the associated peer-reviewed research grant: Hong Kong GRF Fund (No.12503515).
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Hong Kong GRF Fund (No. 12503515 ), as supported by the University of Hong Kong.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Hong Kong GRF Fund (No.12503515), as supported by the University of Hong Kong.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors
PY - 2020/3/18
Y1 - 2020/3/18
N2 - Never in history have global supply-chain relationships in high-tech electronics firms been more sophisticated, complicated, and almost always tied in some major aspect to China. This research examines how interorganizational (IO) cooperation impacts performance and what role relationship learning and information technology (IT) integration play in the value-creation process for Chinese suppliers in business-to-business (B2B) supply chains. We examine this issue using data collected from face-to-face interviews with supply chain managers and executives from 1,004 Chinese high-tech electronic component suppliers. The results strongly support the hypothesis that IO cooperation improves a supplier's performance regarding both its major customer and overall marketplace. Relationship learning and IT integration are important mediating variables that drive performance. The strongest effect in our study was the influence of IO cooperation on relationship learning. A unique aspect of this study is that it focuses on a large sample of a specific supplier type—high-tech Chinese suppliers. This, combined with the fact that the sampled companies were involved in manufacturing 13 different product groups, greatly increases the generalizability of the results.
AB - Never in history have global supply-chain relationships in high-tech electronics firms been more sophisticated, complicated, and almost always tied in some major aspect to China. This research examines how interorganizational (IO) cooperation impacts performance and what role relationship learning and information technology (IT) integration play in the value-creation process for Chinese suppliers in business-to-business (B2B) supply chains. We examine this issue using data collected from face-to-face interviews with supply chain managers and executives from 1,004 Chinese high-tech electronic component suppliers. The results strongly support the hypothesis that IO cooperation improves a supplier's performance regarding both its major customer and overall marketplace. Relationship learning and IT integration are important mediating variables that drive performance. The strongest effect in our study was the influence of IO cooperation on relationship learning. A unique aspect of this study is that it focuses on a large sample of a specific supplier type—high-tech Chinese suppliers. This, combined with the fact that the sampled companies were involved in manufacturing 13 different product groups, greatly increases the generalizability of the results.
KW - Business
KW - Buyer-supplier relationships
KW - Collaboration
KW - Electronics industry
KW - Global supply chain
KW - Globalization
KW - Operations management
KW - Relationship marketing theory
KW - Social exchange theory
KW - Supply chain performance
KW - Technology adoption
KW - Technology management
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85081653487&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03434
DO - 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03434
M3 - Article
C2 - 32211539
AN - SCOPUS:85081653487
SN - 2405-8440
VL - 6
JO - Heliyon
JF - Heliyon
IS - 3
M1 - e03434
ER -