Information sharing and collaborative behaviors in enabling supply chain performance: A social exchange perspective

In modern business, competition is no longer between organizations, but among supply chains. Supply chain is complex in nature, involving various work flows across trading partners. Two major concerns arise in enabling supply chain performance, information sharing and collaborative effort. However, it is necessary to further identify the fundamentals for their implementation in terms of partners' exchange beliefs. Social exchange theory guides interactional behaviors for the expectation of a reward from partners. This study considers four key social exchange issues, trust, commitment, reciprocity, and power and to be antecedents of information sharing and collaboration. This study thus proposes a novel research model to examine the relationships among SET-based variables, information sharing and collaboration, and supply chain performance. Empirical findings show that SET-based issues are important to determine information sharing and collaboration and both information sharing and collaboration indicate partial mediation effect on supply chain performance. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.