Manufacturing Firms In Taiwan Research Articles

How Does Sustainable Leadership Affect Environmental Innovation Strategy Adoption? The Mediating Role of Environmental Identity

This paper uses social identity theory to develop an environmental identity theory and interpret why sustainable leadership can influence environmental identity, which in turn, results in environmental innovation strategy (EIS) adoption. Data were collected from 90 samples of technology manufacturing firms in Taiwan, and a latent growth curve model was employed to analyze the longitudinal data. The research results confirm all hypotheses. Mediating analysis also supports the environmental identity as a mediating role between sustainable leadership and EIS. Indeed, past studies have not explored the mechanism studied in this paper, a novel mechanism which can not only advance the literature on sustainable development but also help companies to realize sustainable development through environmental innovation strategy adoption.

The impact of using a cloud supply chain on organizational performance

PurposeThis study aims to indicate the advantages of using cloud computing services, including the ways in which firms use cloud-based services to achieve accessibility, better communication, flexibility and effective provision of services. However, little evidence has been obtained related to the effectiveness of applying cloud computing services to supply management chains.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, a sample of 223 top 1,000 manufacturing firms in Taiwan that had implemented cloud-based supply chain management systems (CSCMs) was surveyed to determine what kind of internal resources in these companies were allocated to this implementation effort, how collaborative relationships were established in the existing supply chain to help make the transitions successful, how well their systems are working now that they have been implemented and whether these new systems have improved cycle time performance and the overall performance of their organizations. The study also examines the interrelationships among these variables.FindingsThe results reveal that, from the perspective of the managers who were surveyed, an effective allocation of internal organizational resources does have a positive, strong effect on external CSCM conditions. They also showed that when the relationship between internal and external resources is well constructed, the result is that CSCM improves supply chain management cycle time performance, which, in turn, leads to positive organizational performance.Originality/valueThe study reports some useful insights from the managers of CSCM systems related to how the execution of CSCM solutions can improve cycle time and organizational performance by enhancing internal organizational management and joint collaboration among supply chain partners. The findings from this survey will be useful to managers who are considering creating cloud-based supply management systems in the future.

Adapting ERP Systems in the Post-implementation Stage: Dynamic IT Capabilities for ERP

Background: Firms recently rely on enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), to integrate, automate, and support business strategy and operations. However, uncertain environments require firms continuously adapt their ERP systems to meet changing business demands in the post-implementation stage. What capability can drive ERP post-implementation adaptation (PIA) deserves further research. Based on the dynamic capabilities view, we propose that dynamic IT capabilities for ERP, namely IT sensing, IT learning, IT integration, and IT coordination capability, can drive ERP-PIA. Method: A cross-sectional and matched-pair mail survey of both business and IS executives was administrated for collecting data from the top 1,000 manufacturing firms in Taiwan. Partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) was constructed for measurement validation and hypotheses testing. Results: Based on 128 samples (74 firms), our findings demonstrate the importance of the dynamic IT capabilities for achieving higher levels of ERP-PIA. ERP-PIA can facilitate greater organizational benefits from system use. Conclusions: This study conceptualizes and empirically demonstrates the importance of ERP-PIA, which provides a specific example of IT/IS adaptation. This study also conceptualizes dynamic IT capabilities for ERP, and theorizes how these capabilities interact to enable firms to adapt ERP systems to fulfill the emergent demands. This study improvs the understanding of the roles of dynamic IT capabilities for ERP in enabling ERP-PIA and organizational benefits through a richer theoretical framing than that of prior studies.

Influence of institutional and moral orientations on relational risk management in supply chains

Inter-organizational relationships in supply chains are built, maintained, and enhanced to achieve corporate goals. However, relational risk will weaken the success of supply chains. Manufacturers must build forms of relational governance to safeguard against the relational risk of partners. For managing relational risk, this research investigates the contribution of institutional and moral orientations to relational risk management. The results of the study of 260 major manufacturing firms in Taiwan suggest that three types of relational risk—opportunistic behavior, loss of competences, and incomprehension—are significantly affected by institutional and/or moral orientations. The findings provide useful insights into how supply chain members should reinforce their institutional and moral views of relational governance and manage relational risks faced by the supply chain as a whole.

Toward the Service-oriented Transformation of the Manufacturing Firms in Taiwan

The sales and employment of the service industry in Taiwan have exceeded those of the manufacturing sector. This study conducts the value-added chain model to verify the service-oriented strategies...

The Effect of Status Quo Bias on Cloud System Adoption

The cloud-based environment has been viewed as an elastic alternative to hosting information systems. Although a lot of attention is paid in cloud system applications, organizations in business are still skeptical of adopting cloud framework. The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants on firms' reactions toward cloud systems adoption from status quo bias perspective. By using cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) as a research target, data were collected from the leading manufacturing firms in Taiwan. The results indicate that institutional pressures, switching benefits, and switching costs have significant influence on perceived value. Switching benefits and switching costs are key determinants of perceived risk. Perceived value contributes towards organizational adoption intentions, while perceived risk has significant influence on organizational resistance. The findings provide a foundation for understanding the possible determinants of cloud systems adoption as well as valuable implications for organizations seeking to utilize cloud-based framework.

Interorganizational Cooperation and Supply Chain Performance in the Context of Third Party Logistics Services

In this study, we examine the interactions among cooperation and five other factors that affect supply chain performance in the context of third party logistics services. We develop a new research model, with degree of cooperation as a mediating construct and test the model's six research hypotheses using structural equation modelling. The data are from 105 manufacturing firms in Taiwan. The results show that the major factors contributing to cooperation are, in order of importance, self-control costs, transaction frequency and external uncertainty. The findings demonstrate that supply chain members should reinforce their collaborative behavior and activities and enhance cooperation in supply chains to achieve higher levels of performance overall in third party logistics services.

Assessing the competitive priorities within sustainable supply chain management under uncertainty

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) is driving firms to extend their social, economic and environmental efforts across their supply chain. Competitive priorities are a strategic integration in SSCM and thus to firm performance. However, the literature has not thoroughly examined the hierarchical structure among the competitive priorities and SSCM under uncertainty. This study adapts a hierarchical structure and linguistic preferences to identify the competitive priorities under SSCM in electronic focal manufacturing firms in Taiwan. This study formed an expert team with industrial experience and proposed to apply interval-valued triangular fuzzy numbers to represent the linguistic preferences and used multi-criteria decision making to assess the hierarchical structure in identifying the ranking of competitive priorities and the tradeoffs. Specifically, the result found that innovation is a top priority for all SSCM aspects. Likewise, businesses should be aware of suppliers, customers and dependability aspects. The implications and conclusions are discussed.

Will You Share? A Study of Motives and Consequences of Supply Chain Partners’ Information Integration

Based on resource-based view (RBV), this study ascertained if information integration (II) can be exploited to obtain a distinct supply chain (SC) advantage. A survey investigation was conducted for high-tech manufacturing firms in Taiwan. A structural equation modeling was applied to examine nine hypotheses. Most important, we found that investment in II creates better performance and competitive advantage when companies increase capabilities of logistics and partnerships in dynamic SC collaborations. The findings provide insight to guide II investments to enhance SC performance.

Exploring the impact of Web-based e-procurement on performance: organisational, interorganisational, and systems perspectives

This study investigates how the advantages derived from implementing a Web-based e-procurement system in a supply chain can influence a firm's organisational performance. We propose a model that includes the contextual factors from organisational, interorganisational, and systems perspectives involved in the processes of Web-enabled direct procurement. To test the model, we conducted a survey in 105 manufacturing firms in Taiwan and used partial least-squares regression for data analysis. The results revealed that electronic purchasing activities improve organisational-level efficiency as well as the interorganisational dimension. In addition, an enhanced partnership has a positive impact on the performance of both suppliers and buyers. Finally, system initiation and system breadth both have a positive impact on buyers’ organisational performance.

Supplier collaboration and new product performance: a contingency model

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a contingency model to examine how technological capacity, promotion capacity, and technological substitution affect the supplier collaboration‐new product performance relationship.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses data from a Government survey of technological innovation. A total of 201 machinery/electronics equipment manufacturing firms in Taiwan comprise the sample. A Tobit regression analysis is adopted to analyze the data.FindingsIt is found that technological capacity and promotion capacity enhance the effect of supplier collaboration on new product performance. Technological substitution mitigates the relationship between supplier collaboration and new product performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample of this study just focuses on machinery/electronics equipment manufacturing firms. The new insights of this study imply that by failing to consider the contingency roles of technological capacity, promotion capacity, and technological substitution, previous research may have assumed away the conditions external and internal to a firm and thus may have reached an oversimplified view of the link between supplier collaboration and product innovation performance.Practical implicationsFirms can improve the effect of supplier collaboration on product innovation by enhancing their technological capacity and promotion capacity.Originality/valueThe paper makes contributions to explain why some firms attain better new product performance than others under the same level of supplier collaboration.

Behavioral intention formation in knowledge sharing: Examining the roles of KMS quality, KMS self-efficacy, and organizational climate

Firms can obtain competitive advantages from their employees’ knowledge sharing behaviors. This paper presents a research model to examine the direct and indirect effects of knowledge management systems (KMS) quality, KMS self-efficacy, organizational climate and attitude on the intention to share knowledge in the new product development process. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from 134 major electronic manufacturing firms in Taiwan, using partial least squares regression. The results of the empirical study suggest that attitude is the key factor influencing intention to engage in knowledge sharing. The more a factor (such as KMS self-efficacy and organizational climate) positively contributes to attitude, the more the factor contributes to knowledge sharing. The findings provide useful insights into how organizations should encourage employees’ collaborative behaviors or activities so as to reinforce KMS self-efficacy create a favorable organizational climate that will in turn enhance attitude and intention to engage in knowledge sharing leading to benefits for the organization as a whole.

The effects of a project's social capital, leadership style, modularity, and diversification on new product development performance

Due to the rapid advances in information technology and the dynamic business environment, firms are facing more and more competitive challenges. To overcome this, many companies are trying to create new products to maintain their competitiveness. This study aims to explore the key success factors of New Product Development (NPD) performance from the perspectives of social capital, leadership, modularity and diversification of project team members. Therefore, the major research objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive research framework to integrate the effects of social capital, project leadership style, modularity, team member diversification, and NPD performance. Interviewing 500 senior leaders of NPD teams from different manufacturing firms in Taiwan, this study found that: (1) a higher level of participating and selling style of leaderships with a higher level of social capital generate better NPD performance, (2) a higher modularity level of a new product results in better NPD performance, and (3) team member diversification, however, does not have significant impacts on NPD performance. The managerial implications, limitations and future research directions of this work are also provided. Key words: NPD performance, modularity, leadership style, social capital, project team diversity.

Associations between Performance Measurement Diversity and Participation Congruence in R&D Teams: The Impact on Firm Performance

Previous empirical research on participation focuses on the field of ”budgeting”. This study adopts the viewpoint of Clinton and Hunton's participation congruence, and then extends the scope of research to performance measurement systems (PMS). Specifically, we investigate the relationships among the diversity of performance measurement, participation congruence and firm performance. The structural equation modeling is adopted to test the sample of 92 manufacturing firms in Taiwan. The empirical result shows that performance measurement diversity is positively related to firm non-financial performance. In addition, participation congruence has indirectly positive influence on firm non-financial performance through performance measurement diversity. Finally, participation congruence is positively associated with performance measurement diversity.

A taxonomy of green supply chain management capability among electronics-related manufacturing firms in Taiwan

This study investigated crucial green supply chain management (GSCM) capability dimensions and firm performance based on electronics-related manufacturing firms in Taiwan. On the basis of a factor analysis, six green supply chain management dimensions were identified: green manufacturing and packaging, environmental participation, green marketing, green suppliers, green stock, and green eco-design. According to their factor scores in the GSCM dimensions, a cluster analysis subsequently assigned responding firms into four groups, namely, the weak GSCM oriented group, the green marketing oriented group, the green supplier oriented group, and the green stock oriented group. Differences in firm performance and GSCM dimensions among groups were examined. Results indicated that the green marketing oriented group performed best. Based on the resource-based view (RBV), the capability of the green marketing oriented group was considered to be the deployment of a collection of resources that enables it to successfully compete against rivals. The importance of green marketing as a GSCM capability and strategic asset/critical resources for electronics-related manufacturing firms to obtain a competitive edge is therefore highlighted in this study.

Exploitation and Exploration: Learning through Key Buyers and Overseas Subsidiaries

The learning dichotomy of exploitation and exploration offers a parsimonious framework to describe the complex interplay between innovation and efficiency. This study examined the effects of three antecedents on this pair of learning dichotomy: knowledge flow, buyer relations, and transnational strategy. We surveyed a group of manufacturing firms in Taiwan where contract manufacturing is prevalent. The results showed that exploitation learning from the focal firm's key buyer was positively related to all three independent variables: knowledge transfer from the buyer, buyer relations between the two firms, and the focal firm's own transnational strategy. On the other hand, exploration learning from the key buyer was positively related to only buyer relations and transnational strategy. Furthermore, while buyer relations and transnational strategy had about equal effect on exploitation, the effect of transnational strategy on exploration was almost twice that of buyer relations on exploration. The prevailing effects of transnational strategy confirm the absorptive capacity view that effective learning requires internal capability. Particularly for exploration learning, this internal capability happens to be transnational strategy in this study.

Relationships with supply chain partners affecting internal operation of high-tech manufacturers in Taiwan

The increasing number of interactions between Taiwan and the Mainland may bring in both opportunities and competitions among the companies in the region. Companies are forced to continuously change and develop to advance and to sustain in the competitive environment. It also holds true for the companies in the even more competitive high-tech industries. It is therefore of a value to study what challenges the high-tech firms are facing, how these challenges impact on their performance and how these firms are dealing with issues. Among the multiple challenges, supply chain operation has been a critical issue concerning the high-tech manufacturers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between the various supply chain operation determinants (relationships with business partners, internal operation) and the impacts of relationships with supply chain partners on the internal operation and the collective efficacy relating to the scheduling issues in high-tech manufacturing firms in Taiwan. A research framework linking internal operation and relationships with supply chain partners (supplier and customer) and individuals (perceived collective efficacy) is applied.

Trust and knowledge sharing in green supply chains

PurposeThe paper aims to examine how trust interacts with factors affecting interorganizational knowledge sharing in green supply chains, where cooperation and competition coexist.Design/methodology/approachA new research model is developed which comprises nine constructs and 13 research hypotheses, with trust as a mediating construct. The nine constructs are measured by well‐supported measures in the literature. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from 288 major green manufacturing firms in Taiwan, using structural equation modeling.FindingsThe paper finds that trust is the pivot of the factors influencing interorganizational knowledge sharing. The more a factor contributes to trust positively (such as participation and communication) or negatively (such as opportunistic behavior), the more the factor contributes to knowledge sharing correspondingly. The factors with no significant influence on trust (such as shared values and learning capacity) have no or less influence on knowledge sharing.Research limitations/implicationsThe empirical study is conducted on green supply chains, with data collected from Taiwan's green manufacturing firms. With the research model developed, cross‐industrial studies on various forms of supply chains can be conducted to investigate whether differences between supply chains exist about the role that trust plays in interorganizational knowledge sharing.Practical implicationsThe findings of the paper provide useful insights into how supply chain members should reinforce their collaborative behaviors and activities that would enhance the trust‐based relationships, in order to achieve the competitive advantage of knowledge sharing for the supply chain as a whole.Originality/valueThe new research model developed allows the relationships between trust and other influencing factors on interorganizational knowledge sharing to be explored. The model reflects the coexistence of the cooperation and competition relationships between supply chain members, which is not dealt with in previous studies.

Efficiency measures of PCB manufacturing firms using relational two-stage data envelopment analysis

Taiwan is currently the fourth largest contributor to the printed circuit board (PCB) industry. In exploring the operation activities of PCB industry, most studies focuses primarily on manufacturing or production technologies. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of PCB manufacturing firms in Taiwan. Since the whole production process of the manufacturing firms can be divided into two sub-processes: production acquisition and profit earning, this study employs the relational two-stage DEA approach, which takes into account the series relationship of the two sub-processes within the whole process, to decompose and measure the efficiencies of the manufacturing firms. It is found that none of the manufacturing firms perform efficiently both in the stage of production acquisition and the stage of profit earning. In addition, the low efficiency score of the whole production process is mainly due to the low efficiency score of the profit generating process. To improve productivity and profitability, the manufacturing firms need to consider the issues of product improvements and technological innovation in the future.

IT support in manufacturing firms for a knowledge management dynamic capability link to performance

Information technology (IT) is applied in many settings of knowledge management (KM) under the premise that a manufacturing organization will gain direct benefit from the investment. However, direct links from investment in IT to organizational performance have always been elusive. Strategic management research presents a concept of dynamic capabilities to model the ability of an organization to respond effectively to changes in the environment and leverage performance. By using this capability as a mediating variable, IT support of KM is shown to indirectly benefit manufacturing organizations in a sample of managers from 500 manufacturing firms in Taiwan. This link indicates firms must carefully align the IT support to strategic needs.