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A contingent view of e‐collaboration and performance in manufacturing
Author(s) -
Rosenzweig Eve D.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
journal of operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.649
H-Index - 191
eISSN - 1873-1317
pISSN - 0272-6963
DOI - 10.1016/j.jom.2009.03.001
Subject(s) - contingency , contingency theory , business , product (mathematics) , marketing , supply chain , key (lock) , competitive advantage , industrial organization , the internet , knowledge management , process management , computer science , philosophy , linguistics , geometry , mathematics , computer security , world wide web
Manufacturers are increasingly utilizing Internet‐based tools to more readily conduct collaborative activities with key business customers. While the emerging conventional wisdom suggests that the greater the extent to which manufacturers engage in Internet‐enabled commerce with downstream business customers the better the performance, we espouse an alternative view. Consistent with the relational view of competitive advantage and contingency theory, we develop a model and a series of hypotheses that specify how various product and market characteristics may influence the nature of the expected positive relationship between e‐collaboration and performance. To test the model, we collected data from 50 manufacturers using a Web‐based survey. Our partial least squares (PLS) analysis results do indeed support the notion that e‐collaboration is related to better operational and business performance. However, we go on to show that the strength of the relationship between e‐collaboration and operational performance diminishes as the level of environmental munificence increases. Notably, we found no such moderating effect with respect to the level of product complexity or market variability. Our findings contribute to the operations strategy literature on supply chain relationships in the e‐business arena and offer managers a framework for understanding the conditions under which investments in e‐collaboration may be more appropriate and therefore more beneficial.