B2B seller competence: Construct development and measurement using a supply chain strategy lens

In less than a decade, Internet-enabled business-to-business (B2B) commerce has become central to supply chain management. But little is known about the infrastructural competencies required for manufacturers engaged in Internet-enabled activities with downstream business customers. This paper aims to take a first step in operationalizing a set of new, multi-item measures that tap into infrastructural (or “soft”) competencies required for leveraging B2B commerce.We use a structured, two-stage approach to develop and refine a set of constructs, items, and new multi-item measurement scales in order to rigorously evaluate their measurement properties. By drawing upon the literature as well as extensive interviews with expert practitioners, we define and measure the salient infrastructural competencies – termed B2B seller competence (B2B-SC) – associated with the seller-side of Internet-enabled commerce. We find that the conceptual domain of B2B-SC comprises seven theoretically important dimensions: (1) technical skills, (2) change disposition, (3) conflict management, (4) market acuity, (5) coordinated logistics, (6) knowledge channels, and (7) fluid partnering. Operational indicators that tap into constructs pertaining to each B2B-SC dimension are developed through an iterative process.In the second stage, we conduct a field study to more fully assess the measurement properties of item and scale reliability and validity using a covariance structure framework. The results indicate that our new scales exhibit sufficient psychometric properties, which make them useful for theory building, testing, and the refinement of supply chain strategy paradigms in the emerging area of B2B commerce.