The Moderating Effects of Organizational Culture's Adhocracy Dimension on Supplier Collaboration for New Product Development: Evidence From the Consumer Products Industry

Abstract

The end-to-end supply chain for the consumer products industry in recent years has been disrupted by changes in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. To create sustainable competitive advantages for the buyers, collaboration with suppliers for new product development has become a necessity, not only to survive but to compete and win. As with any relationship between two parties, organizational culture plays a critical role in supplier collaboration between a buyer and a supplier. Among the four organizational culture types identified in the competing values framework (CVF) by Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1981, 1983), adhocracy culture focuses on future orientation for development, facilitating collaboration with internal work teams and with external suppliers. Adhocracy culture is embodied with cultural traits of an organization that are needed for supplier collaboration for new product innovation. However, with the enormous volume of literature written on organizational culture in the past 4 decades, the role of adhocracy culture as a moderating factor on the relationship between supplier embeddedness and supplier collaboration has received little attention. In addition, there has been very limited investigation about adhocracy culture’s influence on the new product development process. Drawing on social capital theory and resource-based view of an organization, this research aimed to bridge the current gap in understanding the moderating effects of adhocracy culture on the strength of relationships between supplier embeddedness (trust and knowledge sharing) and the two types of supplier collaboration with fully delegated (black box) and semidelegated (gray box) supplier responsibility, as well as on the strength of relationships between these two types of supplier collaboration and new product development process in the consumer products industry. In addition, this study is one of the first to investigate adhocracy culture’s moderating effects on the relationships between supplier collaboration efforts and new product development process. Structural equation modeling was adopted as the data analytic approach to analyzing survey responses from a sample of 103 consumer products companies. Results of this research showed that trust and knowledge sharing had different influence on the two types of supplier collaboration (black box and gray box), with or without the presence of adhocracy culture as a moderating factor. Adhocracy culture also showed having different moderating influence on the strength of relationships between the two types of supplier collaboration and new product development. These results may have significant relevance to the types of supplier collaboration initiatives and innovation being pursued (that is, incremental versus radical). This research offers contributions to extant literature of supplier embeddedness, supplier collaboration, new product development, and organizational culture on relationships among these constructs. Managerial implications for the moderating role of adhocracy culture in supplier embeddedness, supplier collaboration, new product development process, and types of innovation are discussed.

Date of Award	9 Jun 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Muammer OZER (Supervisor) & Jane YANG (Supervisor)