Interorganizational information systems visibility and supply chain performance

Despite growing emphasis on the importance of supply chain visibility, few companies to date have fully benefited from the information resources of their supply chain partners. A review of existing literature about supply chain visibility reveals that there are two essential forces at work, namely (1) collaborative behavior – i.e., firms willing to share information with supply chain partners in order to leverage social capital, and (2) opportunistic behavior – i.e., firms wanting to maintain some degree of information asymmetry in order to manage the behaviors of their supply chain partners. In order to identify the antecedents of IOS visibility, our operational definition of supply chain visibility, the two theories – resource dependence theory (RDT) and relational view (RV) – are used to cobble together a set of variables in a framework to investigate their relationships to IOS visibility. The data used in this study was collected from 124 intermediate component manufacturers in three different manufacturing industries. The results show that IOS visibility positively influences overall supply chain performance, as measured by operational performance. Regarding the antecedents of IOS visibility, factors including asset specificity, interorganizational trust, complementary resources, and joint governance structures are significant, whereas environmental uncertainty and interdependence are not significant.