Inter-organizational success factors: a cause and effect model

Abstract

Inter-organizational systems form the basis for successful business collaboration in the Internet and B2B e-commerce era. To properly design and manage such systems one needs to understand the structure and dynamics of the relationships between organizations. The evaluation of such inter-organizational relationships (IORs) is normally conducted using ''success factors''. These are often referred to as constructs, such as trust and information sharing. In strategic management and performance analysis, different methods are employed for evaluating business performance and strategies, such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) method. The BSC utilizes success factors for measuring and monitoring IORs against business strategies. For these reasons, a thorough understanding of success factors, the relationships between them, as well as their relationship to business strategies is required. In other words, understanding success factors allows strategists deriving measurements for success factors as well as aligning these success factors with business strategies. This underpins nowadays close relationship between business strategy, IORs and their realization by means of inter-organizational systems. In this paper, we present (1) a systematic literature review studying success factors and their impact on IORs as well as (2) an analysis of the results found. The review is based on 177 publications, published between 2000 and 2012, dealing with factors influencing IORs. The work presented provides an overview on success factors, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (influencing relationships between success factors, as well as their influence on the success of IORs. The work is somehow ''meta-empirical'' as it only looks at published studies and not on own cases. Consequently, it is based on the assumption that studies in scientific literature represent the real-world. The constructs and relationships found in the review are grouped based on their scope and summarized in a cause and effect model. The grouping of constructs results in five groups including Relationship Orientation, Relational Norm, Relational Capital, Atmosphere, and Others. Since the cause and effect model represents a directed graph, different network analysis methods may be applied for analyzing the model. In particular, an in-and out-degree analysis is applied on the cause and effect model for detecting the most influencing as well as the most influenced success factors.

The relationships among supply chain partnerships, customer orientation, and operational performance: the effect of flexibility

“…Manufacturing flexibility is defined as a firm's ability to develop new products, to handle a mix of products, and to adjust production according to demands effectively (Krathu et al 2014), which can enhance a manufacturer's performance in meeting its end customers' requirements speedily by encompassing those areas where flexibility can directly impact a manufacturer's ability to serve customers. Flexibility can provide firms with greater ability to adapt to or accommodate environmental uncertainty.…”

“…From the resource-based view, the supplier integration constructs are supplier partnering and supplier development, with the firm used to frame the direct effects of strategic supplier selection as the capability of a buyer to select a supplier with resources and expertise in a specified domain should enhance the buyer's performance capability (Krathu et al 2014) in the matched domain, and supplier integration has a more complex set of interrelationships that form a rich and dynamic context for the study of buyer-supplier relationships.…”

“…Previously research stated Product demand uncertainty leads to component demand uncertainty, which requires a flexible supply chain relationship (Kim et al 2013a;Krathu et al 2014). The less flexible the relationship, the more likely the buyer will face cost penalties when demand conditions change.…”

Developing the EBS Management Model to Assist SMEs to Evaluate E-Commerce Success

“…Using a set of CSFs identified as one of the key implementation strategies employed in the context of performance analysis and strategic management, SMEs may focus on and manage the few key areas in the implementation process to measure their e-commerce systems, judge the efficacy of e-commerce systems, improve their e-commerce systems, and predict e-commerce usage, which could contribute to the success of these experiential-driven initiatives and help achieve a successful implementation outcome of e-commerce [14,[18][19][20][21][22]. Identifying CSFs that impact the adoption of e-commerce will also make it possible to assess its future growth [21].…”

Modeling of Collaborative Enterprises -- CSFs-Driven High-Level Requirements

“…In case of collaborations, CSFs point to areas where "things must go right" [28, p. 85] in order for collaboration to flourish. The analysis of CSFs for collaborations has been undertaken by several researchers (e.g., [21], [29]- [38]). They indicate that the largest barrier to the success of CEs "is organizational [...] rather than technical or financial" [21, p. 22] and report similar sets of CSFs, although sometimes the terms used to describe them differ.…”