Supply chain security culture: measure development and validation

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to present a newly developed scale useful for measuring supply chain security culture (SCSC), defined as the overall organizational philosophy that creates supply chain security as a priority among its employees through embracing and projecting norms and values to support secure activities and to be vigilant with security efforts. Design/methodology/approach -The approach to developing a scale for SCSC follows the steps presented by Churchill. This includes conducting steps such as: generating items, establishing face and content validity, conducting a pretest to refine items, and validating the scale through an additional data collection so reliability, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity can be evaluated. Findings -The process yielded a unidimensional, five-item scale with strong psychometric properties. Through empirical verification, this scale is shown to exhibit high levels of reliability and validity. Research limitations/implications -Organizational culture has been a construct of interest in social science research for many years. The new phenomenon of supply chain security has been recently introduced to academics and practitioners. Thus, the presented scale has applications for theory and practice. Limitations of the study include allowing one error term to correlate in the SCSC scale and the resiliency scale, a somewhat low response rate, and no ability to test for common method variance bias. Practical implications -Practitioners will find the presented scale useful in gauging the culture of their respective organizations in terms of supply chain security. A security focused culture is important for organizations to protect their supply chain. Originality/value -The paper provides a useful measurement tool for use in future research addressing the social aspects of security management within the supply chain context.

Examining Antecedents to Supply Chain Security Effectiveness: An Exploratory Study

“…The lower than ideal response rate was not surprising due to the proprietary and sensitive nature of security. Also, the response rate is better than other similar surveys on firm security (Williams et al. 2009).…”

Measuring Service Quality in the Banking Industry: A Hong Kong Based Study

“…It is a fundamental element for confirming the validity of a construct and should be determined before other validation processes (Garver & Mentzer, 1999). In this study, we tested the unidimensionality of each component factor by first Contemporary Management Research 272 looking at the results of a principal component analysis (PCA) in the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and analyzing the alpha scores (Williams et al, 2009). Factor analysis using PCA and Varimax rotation confirmed scale development and yielded six different factors.…”

Emergence of security in supply chain management literature

“…A further consensus seems to have developed that security performance will differ between firms who will take a leadership position in security capabilities and firms who are followers, separating secure supply chain from highly secure supply chains (Hameri and Hintsa 2009, p. 751;Peleg-Gillai et al 2006;Voss 2009b). One of the differentiating factors is posited to be the supply chain security culture fostered in a company (Voss 2009b;Williams et al 2009b). That managerial support is a prerequisite for the success of security measures has already been mentioned as a finding in this paper.…”

“…To the contrary, supply chain security is now showing potential to create competitive advantages for industry leaders in this area (Autry and Bobbitt 2008, p. 56). (Helferich and Cook 2002); (Knemeyer, et al 2008); (Chopra and Sodhi 2004), (Fletcher 2007); (Williams et al 2009a); ); (Whipple, et al 2009), (Cavinato 2004); (Williams et al 2009b); (Williams, et al 2008) Trusting SC partnerships (Laeequddin, et al 2009 Themes for the future will look at how costs and benefits of security can be spread along the supply chain. Sharing of costs, risk and benefits is still a reoccurring issue inherent in the practice and theory of SCM (Laeequddin et al 2009;Manuj and Mentzer 2008).…”

“…Williams, Ponder and Autry posited that a difference in organizational security culture between partners in the supply chain could impact the trust and commitment of these organizational relationships (Williams et al 2009b). Table 3 lists the emergent SCS solutions in the literature.…”