Interorganizational Cooperation and Supplier Performance in High-Technology Supply Chains

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. The setting makes interorganizational (IO) cooperation in a cross-cultural context, infused with Chinese culture and relationships, which absolutely crucial for global organizations to understand to have success in this environment. Ironically, although China is now more involved in this global supply chain than any other country in the world, this context is highly understudied, and most of the supply-chain literature is fundamentally rooted in a Western perspective and with data from Western countries and companies. This gap creates serious blind spots in theory, research, and policy, and leads to the research question driving this study: How does IO cooperation influence supplier performance in the context of China’s high-tech hardware components industry? In this context, we thus examines how IO cooperation impacts performance and what role information technology (IT) integration and relationship learning play in the value-creation process for suppliers in business-to-business (B2B) supply chains. In examining these two dimensions, this study proposes a model that differentiates between a supplier’s performances regarding (a) its major customer and (b) the general market. The researchers conducted in-depth 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. This study makes notable contributions to the literature by simultaneously testing the influences of IO cooperation, relationship learning, and IT integration on supplier performance. A unique aspect of this study is that it focuses on a very 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. The strongest effect in our study was the influence of IO cooperation on relationship learning.