Supply Chain Collaboration or Conflict? Information Sharing and Supply Chain Performance in the Automotive Industry

Abstract

Information sharing in supply chains has taken a centre stage in the discourse of business and research in the last few decades, because information is not only the linchpin for companies for leaping ahead, but also the key to survival. It is thus imperative for practitioners to get inside the “black box” of the decision-making context in which supply chain information is either shared or retained and to exploit the intricate relationship between information sharing/retaining and supply chain performance. In this study, the influential antecedents of the decision-making process including goals, inter-organizational conflicts, power, and trust are investigated on the supply chain level. Employing a comparative case study in the automotive industry, a set of theoretical propositions could be derived by focusing on causal-process observations. Our study contributes to the process of theory construction and has several important implications for practitioners. Since goal conflicts are often not well understood in practice and their impact on supply chain performance is frequently realized with delay, practitioners need to know about the roles of goals, inter-organizational conflict of goals, power, and trust in order to facilitate supply chain-wide information sharing and improve supply chain performance.