Supply chain collaboration: Impact on collaborative advantage and firm performance

Facing uncertain environments, firms have strived to achieve greater supply chain collaboration to leverage the resources and knowledge of their suppliers and customers. The objective of the study is to uncover the nature of supply chain collaboration and explore its impact on firm performance based on a paradigm of collaborative advantage. Reliable and valid instruments of these constructs were developed through rigorous empirical analysis. Data were collected through a Web survey of U.S. manufacturing firms in various industries. The statistical methods used include confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (i.e., LISREL). The results indicate that supply chain collaboration improves collaborative advantage and indeed has a bottom-line influence on firm performance, and collaborative advantage is an intermediate variable that enables supply chain partners to achieve synergies and create superior performance. A further analysis of the moderation effect of firm size reveals that collaborative advantage completely mediates the relationship between supply chain collaboration and firm performance for small firms while it partially mediates the relationship for medium and large firms.