Exploring relationships among IT-enabled sharing capability, supply chain flexibility, and competitive performance

This research explores the mechanism through which IT infrastructure enables superior firm performance by empirically examining the links among IT-enabled sharing capability, supply chain flexibilities (as measured by a manufacturing firm's product development flexibility, production flexibility, logistics flexibility, suppliers' flexibility, and the flexibility of the supply base), and competitive performance. This study expands the research on IT's impact on competitive performance by focusing on IT-enabled sharing capability and the indirect effect of this capability on firm performance. Most prior research focused on the technical aspects of IT infrastructure and tested direct relationships. In this research, a large-scale survey was used to collect 198 responses from U.S. manufacturers to investigate this framework. Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine and test the measurement and structural models. The results indicated that IT-enabled sharing capability is associated with flexibilities in a manufacturer's supply chain, which in turn are associated with the firm's competitive performance. This finding suggests that a firm should focus on flexibilities in the supply chain to improve its performance. IT-enabled sharing capability is an antecedent for improving these flexibilities. Longitudinal research, multiple respondents, and techniques for improving response rate should be considered in future research to provide more robust results. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.