Challenges in the global supply chain: Exploitation versus exploration strategy.

摘要

Supply chain environments are changing at an accelerating pace throughout the globe, creating significant challenges for firms in maintaining a competitive advantage. To sustain competitiveness, firms should embrace these challenges arising out of globalization and be able to manage the global supply chain effectively. This research postulates that selection of supply chain design plays an important role in reducing the intensity of challenges imposed by global challenges such as technology uncertainty, internationalization, intellectual property protection and economic uncertainty. The research also studies how these challenges impact supply chain designs, i.e., Lean and Responsive. This research examines the moderating effects of cultural intelligence and type of product on the relationship between perceived global challenges and the choice of supply chain designs, i.e., lean and responsive. It also studies the relationship between lean supply chain design and operational collaboration as well as responsive supply chain design and strategic collaboration. This study is supported by: (1) Exploitation and exploration Theory and (2) Theory of Rational search.;The research methodology used to support and validate results of this study included pre-test and Q-sort analysis and a large scale survey that yielded 204 usable responses from supply chain professionals covering a wide variety of industries. A comprehensive research framework was tested using structural equation modeling. Findings from this research confirm that firms embrace global challenges by selecting a specific type of supply chain design and indicate that the relationship between global challenges and supply chain design is mediated by the type of product, and cultural intelligence. The findings also confirm that firms need to prioritize and differentiate possible contributions from different collaboration patterns, and are expected to be a useful resource for researchers and practitioners in the global supply chain arena.