اثر اعتماد و قدرت قهری بر روی یکپارچه سازی تامین کننده

Supply chain integration nowadays is considered an important approach to building and sustaining competitive advantages. Many previous empirical researches have investigated trust and power between suppliers and customers, yet, the effects of trust and coercive power on supply chain integration are still largely unknown. This study investigates trust, coercive power and their interaction and their impact on internal and supplier integration, based on data collected in Chinese supply chains. The results reveal that both trust and coercive power improve internal and supplier integration, but when trust is low, coercive power reduces internal integration. Contradictory to conventional wisdom that coercive power hinders cooperation, this study found that coercive power improves supplier integration in Chinese supply chains, with or without the presence of trust. This study provides significant insights for Chinese inter-organizational trust–power relationship management and supply chain integration practices.

Nowadays in an ever changing and fiercely competitive marketplace, solely being cost efficient in supply chain management (SCM) does not suffice. Instead, supply chains should be agile, adaptable and aligned to meet the challenges of competitive environments (Lee, 2004). In this context, the need for supply chain integration has echoed in various industries, and companies are learning that they must collaborate to compete (Bleeke and David, 1993; Hulsmann et al., 2008). Van Der Vaart and Van Donk (2008) reviewed 33 survey-based research and find that supply chain integration greatly improves company performance. Furthermore, today's manufacturers are becoming increasingly reliant on their suppliers to gain competitive advantages. Partnerships with suppliers have become the lifeblood of the supply chain, and the issue is not whether to build partnership with suppliers, but how (Liker and Choi, 2004). Previous studies have linked the importance of supply chain integration to competitive advantage (e.g. Lee and Billington, 1992), supply chain performance (e.g. Narasimhan and Kim, 2002), operational performance (e.g. Frohlich and Westbrook, 2001), as well as low transaction costs (e.g. Zhao et al., 2008). However, only a few studies elaborated on the initiators of supply chain integration and how they function. Yet, most of these studies fail to explain the interrelationship among the initiators and supply chain integration. The rationale behind supply chain integration is to combine partners’ resources and perspectives into a firm's value propositions, thus allowing all companies in a supply chain to excel in performance. Historically, it was found that hidden information and actions among supply chain partners, as well as lack of trust (Narayanan and Raman, 2004), refrain companies from cooperating with their supply chain partners (Fawcett and Magnan, 2002). The reason for the lack of trust is embedded in the fact that supply chain partners have differing interests (Beth et al., 2003). Yet, trust was found to be a pivotal factor that affects supply chain cooperation (Kelle and Akbulut, 2005). Alongside with trust, use of power is another important supply chain attribute which influences supply chain practice. Supply chain partners are conditioned by the power to make substantial investments to sustain business relationships (Cox, 2001). Furthermore, the power structure of the supply chain also greatly influences supply chain integration (Van Donk and Van Der Vaart, 2005; Zhao et al., 2008). Although supply chain scholars have expressed great interest in trust and power, an in-depth examination of prior studies indicates that most research focuses on the effects of the sole relationship of power and SCM (e.g. Crook and Combs, 2007; Griffith et al., 2006), or trust and SCM (e.g. Johnston et al., 2004; McCarter and Northcraft, 2007), with little attention paid to the interaction effect of power and trust in SCM. Hart and Saunders (1997) proposed that both power and trust play important roles in the adoption and use of electronic data interchange between trading partners, and that the demonstration of trust is related to the use of power. Ireland and Webb (2007) proposed that firms will be more fully committed to supply chain relationships when trust and power are simultaneously managed between participants. Yet, both previous studies fail to test the postulated hypotheses with large scale empirical evidence. Our research covers this gap by integrating resource dependence theory (RDT) (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) and transaction cost theory (TCT) (Williamson, 1975) to explore the roles of trust and power simultaneously on supplier integration, using a large scale empirical study. Most previous empirical research on supply chain integration, trust, and power are based on Western economies, while our study focuses on China, which supply chains play an increasingly important role on a global scale (Su et al., 2008). In addition, because Chinese culture varies substantially from a western culture on issues such as collectivism, high power distance, and guanxi, this study provides significant managerial insights on how to use trust and power to influence supply chain integration in China (Zhao et al., 2006a, Zhao et al., 2007 and Zhao et al., 2008).

In this paper, we explored the role of trust and coercive power in internal and supplier integration, based on a sample of Chinese supply chains. Trust significantly influenced both internal integration and supplier integration, while coercive power only directly affected supplier integration. We also found that when buyers establish trust with suppliers, suppliers’ use of coercive power will enhance internal integration, while if trust is absent, use of power actually damages integration practices. Trust and power always improve supplier integration in Chinese supply chains. Theoretically, our research contributes to a better understanding of supply chain integration by addressing power and trust as two interdependent, rather than independent, relational management mechanisms for integration. We focus on both main and interaction effects, which is omitted by the majority of previous studies. Moreover, we also contribute to the power literature by providing evidence that a high coercive power position does not necessarily impair cooperation behaviors, and that the potential negative effects of coercive power can be balanced by the development of trust in the relationship. In contrast to popular belief in western cultures that coercive power leads to worse cooperation, our findings show that coercive power improves supplier integration in the Chinese high power distance culture, and hence contributes to the knowledge base of power and culture. Our research also yields some practical insights for managers concerning the improvement of supply chain integration through managing relationships with supply chain partners. To improve internal integration, buyers should first build a good trust relationship with suppliers. Using this as a basis, suppliers’ use of power will enhance the buyer's effort in internal integration. If such trust cannot be established, suppliers should be careful to use coercive power because it will damage internal integration practices. On the other hand, if supply chain participants want to improve supplier integration, they should use a high level of power and trust concurrently to manage the relationship. This study also has several limitations which open up venues for further research. The first possible extension of our research is a longitudinal study. We argued that trust and power will facilitate integration based on the cross-sectional data collected in China. Longitudinal evidence is needed to further explore how trust and power interact with each other over time, as well as the interdependence of supply chain relationships and supply integration. A second limitation relates to the fact that our research deployed a specific type of power (coercive power) and general trust measured by only two items. The literature reports many different kinds of trust (e.g. goodwill trust, competence trust, contractual trust, and calculative trust) and power (e.g. reward power, expert power, legitimate power, and referent power). Future studies may address the impact of these different kinds of trust and power on supply chain integration. In particular, for varying types of power or trust, the effects of coercive power and trust may differ as well. A third limitation relates to the fact that the supply chain was viewed as a buyer–supplier dyad. However, as customers play an increasingly important role in SCM, many firms share information with customers, or even involve customers into the product design and production processes. This leads to the emerging view of the supply chain as a supplier–manufacturer–customer triad, and future studies could explore how the relationships with customers influence supply chain integration practices. Finally, the relationships between trust, power, and integration may be different for companies in different industries or different regions with different cultures. Future studies can investigate the conceptual model in different industries or different cultures.