The underlying premise is important; firms seeking to build technological bridges between supply chain members, whether internal or external,must at the same time focus on the firm’s operational integration with those cooperating firms. The employees chiefly concerned with administrating the integration between supply chain members’ operations must therefore be aware of external units’ strategic missions, directions, and activities, to prevent technological misalignment. Thus, a form of collaborative planning akin to that often seen in firms’ CPFR or other collaborative efforts would also be well-suited to the deployment of supply chain technology, wherein joint information sharing, goal sharing, and planning drive the technology project through to fruition. Such meetings should become a monthly calendar item for firms seeking to unify their supply chain operations through technological connections.Limitations and future researchAs with most empirical studies, this research has limitations. First, the data examined are cross-sectional, and therefore, any causal effects of operand and operant resource investment are obscured; future research should examine the benefits that operant and operand resources yield over time. Particularly, given that the sample was divided to execute scale reduction, the small size of this sample is a limitation of the research, and future replications should include larger samples to achieve greater power and generalizability. Additionally, although this research included respondents from both buyers and sellers, it did not examine supply chain relationships in the context of linked dyads. Future research should examine how the framework applies to all parties within linked relationships to clarify the effects.The sample frame of this study features firms from a variety of nations, but it is not a globally generalizable sample. Because supply chain practice is so often global in scope, future research
should collect data from enough cultural regions to offer a better statement about the how these differences impact supply chains. Similarly, this study represents a broad range of industries, but future research should determine if there are industry-specific differences in outcomes from varying levels of the operant and operand resources explored here. Additionally, firm size (measured as both relative number of employees and relative volumeof sales) had varying relationships with the mediating and outcome variables, suggesting that research is needed on the effects of RTI based on firm size.
Additional limitations are related to the measures used in this study. At the time these data were collected, the survey instruments used were the most current and generally accepted by the
academy. Recent research, however, has offered a new means of measuring collaboration (Cao and Zhang 2011). Replications or extensions of this study are needed to see if more current survey
instruments yield similar results to those reported here, particularly given calls to more thoroughly investigate the value of collaboration in supply chain research (Daugherty 2011).
The managerial and theoretical implications of this research suggest other future research directions. Differences in the influence that collaboration and integration each have on performance here require investigation. The differences in the relationships between these variables and the mediating and outcome variables cannot be definitively interpreted in this case. However, such differences beg questions about how collaboration and integration differ, and whether such differences represent another distinction in Madhavaram and Hunt’s operant
resource hierarchy. Additionally, the managerial implications indicate that both collaboration and integration resources should be leveraged at both managerial and employee levels. However, the sample does not include multiple respondents from individual firms, representing multiple managerial levels. Thus, future studies should include both managers and employees of the same firms in their samples to assess whether there are differences in the relationship between performance outcomes and both collaboration and integration based on differences in the
level of the respondent.
How and why firms successfully compete collectively is one of the questions that lies at the heart of research in supply chain management. Exploring the means by which firms leverage their ability to collaborate, and how those means and abilities relate to the performance outcomes that all firms pursue is one step toward understanding how these relationships operate. It will also enable firms to realize where investments can contribute to the success of these supply chain relationship networks.
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