There have been several studies focusing on the impact of supply chain cooperative relationship on performance, which is mainly based on transaction cost theory and the resource-based view theory. Our study deeply analyzes the inner mechanism between supply chain cooperative relationship and its performance from a perspective of knowledge management. We totally collected 136 valid samples in the questionnaire survey. Through the empirical study, we find: 1) Supply chain cooperative relationship has an obviously positive impact on performance; 2) Knowledge sharing is a partial mediator variable between supply chain cooperative relationship and performance; 3) Environmental uncertainty takes a positive regulating effect for supply chain cooperative relationship to promote knowledge sharing between enterprises, but has no obvious effect for the influence of knowledge sharing to performance. According to findings above, our study is aimed to provide some suggestions to Chinese enterprises on a knowledge management perspective.
The tendency of global economy and Internet technology make a huge impact on development of industries involving supply chain. By reason that supply chain is composed of the relative upstream and downstream companies, the managers need not only to focus on a single company but also to consider cooperative relationship between them, to promote supply chain performance totally.
Supply Chain Cooperative Relationship means aligning the activities of two or more organizations in the supply chain to coordinate the supply of goods or services, creating a competitive advantage through improved service or efficiency improvements [
However, researchers seldom think about effect of knowledge in above process [
In performance-relative studies, “input-process-output” structure is widely used to construct performance model, which is so-called IPO model [
We refer to Fynes’ study (2005) to divide our variable supply chain cooperative relationship to 4 dimensions: trust, commitment, communication and adaptation. Knowledge can be divided to explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge by judging whether it can be encoded with formal and systematic language and record clearly. Different kinds of knowledge make different influences on knowledge sharing, so we will divide knowledge to explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge. Researcher Beamon proposes that supply chain performance can be divided to resource, output, and flexibility three sides, in which resource side includes cost, inventory, and return on investment (ROI), with the goal of minimum cost and maximum efficiency; output side mainly include market, aiming at high quality of production service and customer satisfaction; flexibility side focuses on a company’s ability to make immediate response when facing uncertainty. We choose Beamon’s method to divide supply chain performance after considering both our study object and uncertain factors.
In supply chain, for achieving the presupposed goal, companies will build the cooperative relationship with each other [
1) Trust and Performance
Trust means a company has the confidence with its partners’ integrity and reliability. High trust level is helpful to decrease exchange cost between companies, and increase success probability of transaction [
2) Commitment and Performance
Commitment means a company makes a promise to its partner for performing duties and obligations. In supply chain, commitment make companies respect with each other [
3) Communication and Performance
Communication means an information exchange method of companies’ for promoting cooperation and performance. Firstly, previous studies show that communication can not only increase trust of both sides [
4) Adaption and Performance
Adaption means the integration degree of companies’ cooperative process. The better the adaption is, the more possible for companies to adapt with each other, and the easier to solve conflicts [
H1: Supply chain cooperative relationship has positive effect on performance;
H1a: Supply chain cooperative relationship has positive effect on resource performance;
H1b: Supply chain cooperative relationship has positive effect on output performance;
H1c: Supply chain cooperative relationship has positive effect on flexible performance.
Besides the lack of constraining and driving force, knowledge sharing in supply chain faces more difficulties than that in internal company. In a trust-based partnership, both sides of company have faith in their cooperation or transaction, and they think it unnecessary to prevent themselves from opportunistic practice of others, so that they are more likely to sharing knowledge with others [
H2: Supply chain cooperative relationship has positive effect on knowledge sharing;
H2a: Supply chain cooperative relationship has positive effect on explicit knowledge sharing;
H2b: Supply chain cooperative relationship has positive stronger effect on implicit knowledge sharing than that on explicit knowledge.
The effect paths from knowledge sharing to supply chain performance mainly include as follows: First, knowledge sharing helps companies to obtain both inner and outer resources, and companies could integrate them to self development strategy [
H3: Knowledge sharing has positive effect on supply chain performance;
H3a: Explicit knowledge sharing has positive effect on resource performance;
H3b: Explicit knowledge sharing has positive effect on out-performance;
H3c: Explicit knowledge sharing has positive effect on flexible performance;
H3d: Implicit knowledge sharing has positive effect on resource performance;
H3e: Implicit knowledge sharing has positive effect on out-performance;
H3f: Implicit knowledge sharing has positive effect on flexible performance.
Previous study about supply chain performance shows that, many independent variables are not directly related to performance, there also exist some mediator variables [
H4: Knowledge sharing has mediating effect in process from supply chain cooperative relationship to performance;
H4a: Explicit knowledge sharing has mediating effect in process from supply chain cooperative relationship to performance;
H4b: Implicit knowledge sharing has mediating effect in process from supply chain cooperative relationship to performance.
1) Moderating Effect of Environment Uncertainty between Supply Chain Cooperative Relationship and Knowledge Sharing
Relative study shows, company cooperation is helpful to decrease negative effect of environment uncertainty [
H5: Environment uncertainty has positive moderating effect between supply chain cooperative relationship and knowledge sharing;
2) Moderating Effect of Environment Uncertainty between Knowledge Sharing and Supply Chain Performance
Uncertainty will cause knowledge transaction barrage [
H6: Environment uncertainty has negative moderating effect between knowledge sharing and supply chain performance.
In conclusion of Section 2 and Section 3 above, we build our study model (
Our study choose questionnaire to collect data. The questionnaire includes following 5 sections: basic information, supply chain cooperation relationship scale, knowledge sharing scale, supply chain performance scale and environment uncertainty scale, with seven point Likert scale method. And every scale all refer to maturity scales of relative fields.
We randomly sample some target companies within the field of high-tech industry in the area of Yangtze River Delta Region, Pearl River Delta Region and Wuhan Region. We totally give out 155 questionnaires, collect 140 questionnaires, which means a recovery rate of 90.3%. After discarding 4 invalid items, we finally collect 136 valid questionnaires, which means a valid recovery rate of 87.7%. Among the participants above, most enterprises are in relative industries of semiconductor, electronics, photovoltaic and computer science, with an establishment age from 10 to 30 years, and a stuff scale from 500 to 1000 people. About the 80.1% of that are males, and rest of 19.9% are females, in which
almost of them are middle or senior managers, with 3 to 15 years of working experience.
We choose Cronbach’s α to measure reliability of questionnaire. The result shows, the value of trust, commitment, communication and adaption respectively are 0.606, 0.734, 0.745 and 0.788; the value of explicit knowledge sharing and implicit knowledge sharing respectively are 0.710 and 0.652; the value of resource, output and flexible performance respectively are 0.806, 0.903 and 0.851; the value of environment uncertainty is 0.912. In conclusion, our questionnaire is reliable. After KMO and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity, we continue an exploratory analysis, and finally get the result: the factor loading of every variable are above 0.5, and their cumulative interpretation of variance are above 64%, which means our questionnaire has a good structure validity.
1) Correlation Analysis
We choose SPSS to make statistics and analysis of the collected questionnaires. The result of correlation analysis shows, the correlation coefficient of implicit knowledge sharing and resource performance is not significant, which is contrary to H3d, and other results preliminarily support H1(a, b, c), H2(a, b), H3(a, b, c, e, f). All results are shown in
2) Regression Analysis
We choose regression analysis to verify the causality of each variable, and verify our hypothesis.
SCCR | EKS | IKS | KS | EU | RP | OP | FP | SCP | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
SCCR | 1 | ||||||||
ESK | 0.294*** | 1 | |||||||
IKS | 0.606*** | 0.629*** | 1 | ||||||
KS | 0.482*** | 0.856*** | 0.821*** | 1 | |||||
EU | 0.708** | 0.766*** | 0.799*** | 0.830*** | 1 | ||||
RP | 0.252** | 0.391*** | 0.091 | 0.264** | 0.717*** | 1 | |||
OP | 0.701*** | 0.523*** | 0.685*** | 0.649*** | 0.610*** | 0.881*** | 1 | ||
FP | 0.678*** | 0.512*** | 0.790*** | 0.700*** | 0.601*** | 0.633*** | 0.698*** | 1 | |
SCP | 0.786*** | 0.695*** | 0.611*** | 0.559*** | 0.677*** | 0.755*** | 0.609*** | 0.699*** | 1 |
Mean | 4.892 | 4.977 | 4.86 | 4.919 | 5.019 | 4.953 | 5.013 | 4.614 | 4.86 |
Std. | 0.8074 | 1.0626 | 1.0398 | 1.0435 | 0.8557 | 1.1432 | 1.1449 | 0.9956 | 1.1045 |
***: P < 0.001; **: P < 0.01; *: P < 0.05. SCCP: supply chain cooperation relationship; KS: knowledge sharing; EKS: explicit knowledge sharing; IKS: implicit knowledge sharing; SCP: supply chain performance; RP: resource performance; OP: output performance; FP: flexible performance; EU: environment uncertainty. The same as following tables.
The regression results of supply chain cooperation relationship and performance are shown in
The regression results of supply chain cooperation relationship and knowledge sharing are shown in
The regression results of knowledge sharing and performance are shown in
To verify mediating effect, we refer Wen’s method to avoid type I or II statistical error rates [
According to the discriminant coefficients above, knowledge sharing (a = 0.394***) and implicit knowledge sharing (a = 0.606***) has a partial mediating effect, H4 and H4b are supported. But explicit knowledge sharing (a = 0.134) is not significant, we need continue a Sobel verification, shown in
The result shows statistics Z is 5.934, whose absolute value is larger than critical value (0.97), which means p is less than 0.05, so explicit knowledge sharing also has a partial mediating effect, H4b is supported.
SCP | RP | OP | FP | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
β | T | β | T | β | T | β | t | |
SCCR H1, H1(a, b, c) | 0.786 | 14.697*** | 0.252 | 3.02** | 0.701 | 11.39*** | 0.678 | 10.69*** |
F-Statistics | 215.991*** | 9.112** | 129.695*** | 114.202*** | ||||
R2 | 0.617 | 0.064 | 0.492 | 0.46 | ||||
Adjusted R2 | 0.614 | 0.057 | 0.488 | 0.456 | ||||
Constant B | 2.151 | 0.247 | 0.783 | 0.835 | ||||
Sig. | 0 | 0.003 | 0 | 0 |
KS | EKS | IKS | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
β | T | β | T | β | t | |
SCCR H2, H2(a, b) | 0.482 | 8.77*** | 0.294 | 3.411*** | 0.606 | 8.824*** |
F-Statistics | 45.311*** | 11.967*** | 77.857*** | |||
R2 | 0.232 | 0.086 | 0.367 | |||
Adjusted R2 | 0.229 | 0.081 | 0.363 | |||
Constant B | 0.237 | 0.261 | 0.543 | |||
Sig. | 0 | 0 | 0 |
SCP | RP | OP | FP | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
β | T | β | T | β | T | β | t | |
KS H3 | 0.559 | 7.80*** | 0.264 | 3.17** | 0.649 | 9.87*** | 0.7 | 11.34*** |
F-Statistics | 60.907** | 10.072** | 97.600*** | 128.597*** | ||||
R2 | 0.312 | 0.07 | 0.421 | 0.49 | ||||
Adjusted R2 | 0.307 | 0.063 | 0.417 | 0.486 | ||||
Constant B | 0.521 | 0.205 | 0.854 | 1.015 | ||||
Sig. | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||||
β | T | β | T | β | T | β | t | |
EKS H3(a, b, c) | 0.391 | 4.91*** | 0.523 | 7.11*** | 0.512 | 6.95*** | ||
F-Statistics | 24.237*** | 50.571*** | 47.0685*** | |||||
R2 | 0.153 | 0.274 | 0.262 | |||||
Adjusted R2 | 0.147 | 0.269 | 0.257 | |||||
Constant B | 0.408 | 0.622 | 0.671 | |||||
Sig. | 0 | 0 | 0 | |||||
β | T | β | T | β | T | β | t | |
IKS H3(d, e, f) | 0.091 | −1.05 | 0.682 | 10.799*** | 0.79 | 14.91*** | ||
F-Statistics | 1.112*** | 116.623*** | 222.365*** | |||||
R2 | 0.008 | 0.465 | 0.624 | |||||
Adjusted R2 | 0.001 | 0.461 | 0.621 | |||||
Constant B | −0.099 | 0.851 | 1.087 | |||||
Sig. | 0.294 | 0 | 0 |
Discriminant coefficient | KS | EKS | IKS | SCP | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
c | SCCR | 0.786*** | |||
a | SCCR | 0.394*** | 0.134 | 0.606*** | |
c’ | SCCR | 0.669*** | 0.752*** | 0.578*** | |
b | KS | 0.295*** | |||
b1 | EKS | 0.249*** | |||
b2 | IKS | 0.343*** |
Causality | Mediator | A | Sa | B | Sb | Z |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
SCCR-SCP | EKS | 0.134 | 0.080 | 0.249 | 0.039 | 5.934 |
According to
After above theoretical derivation and empirical analysis, we can draw the conclusion that: 1) Supply chain cooperative relationship has an obviously positive impact on performance; 2) Knowledge sharing is a partial mediator variable between supply chain cooperative relationship and performance, and implicit knowledge sharing has stronger mediating effect than explicit knowledge sharing; 3) Environmental uncertainty takes a positive regulating effect for supply chain cooperative relationship to promote knowledge sharing between enterprises, but has no obvious effect for the influence of knowledge sharing to performance. These study results not only provide relative theory basis for supply chain management research, but also provide guidance to managers to take measures to enhance company partnership, promote knowledge sharing, and supply chain performance: 1) Establish a common value, to decrease cooperation resistance and knowledge differences between partners; 2) Establish relative motivation and restriction system, and reify the benefit included; 3) Use modernized method, such as mobile office app and remote meeting system, to improve intercompany knowledge sharing level; 4) Attach importance to the effect of implicit knowledge to company performance, build the intercompany communication and share mechanism.
The restriction of our study is, first, we only focus on the mediating effect of knowledge sharing, but there are many other sections in the whole knowledge
M1 | M2 | M3 | M4 | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
KS | KS | SCP | SCP | |||||
Variable | β | T | β | T | β | T | β | T |
SCCR | 0.171** | 1.953 | 0.191** | 2.211 | ||||
EU | 0.409*** | 6.831 | 0.390*** | 6.829 | ||||
SCCR* EU | 0.448*** | 3.934 | ||||||
KS | 0.296*** | 3.831 | 0.296*** | 9.246 | ||||
EU | 0.284*** | 4.827 | 0.283*** | 4.783 | ||||
KS* EU | 0.067 | 0.577 | ||||||
R² | 0.375 | 0.44 | 0.415 | 0.416 | ||||
Adj.R² | 0.365 | 0.427 | 0.406 | 0.403 | ||||
F | 39.824 | 34.597 | 47.171 | 31.4 | ||||
ΔR² | 0.065 | 0.001 |
management, so we can do further study on the mediating effect of these different sections; second, our study only cover the supply chain of several industries, we can explore more fields, such as some restructuring traditional industries or the industries with combination of high-tech and tradition.
Tian, A.D. (2018) The Impact of Supply Chain Cooperative Relationship on Performance: A Knowledge Management Perspective. Journal of Service Science and Management, 11, 44-55. https://doi.org/10.4236/jssm.2018.111005