Investigating Supplier-Supplier Co-Opetition and Buyer Implications – A Project on Buyer-Supplier-Supplier Triads in a Supply Chain Resilience Context

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Durach
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398590876

Over the past decades companies have increasingly disintegrated their supply chains resulting in largely fragmented and dispersed networks. This “core competency strategy”, which has its origins in the resource-based view, has certainly provided companies with multiple advantages such as cost savings, capacity flexibility, innovativeness, etc.; however, these disintegration practices have also made supply chains more fragile and vulnerable to disruptions. Current research in the discipline suggests ‘buyer-supplier relationship management’ vehicles through which buying-firms can mitigate such disruptions. However, the dyadic (i.e. buyer-supplier) perspective taken in these studies disregards the ubiquitous theoretical argument for triads (i.e. buyer-supplier-supplier) as the smallest conceivable entity of supply chains. Despite recent practical instances, in which buying firms have experienced direct impacts from their suppliers’ interactions, this arena remains largely unobserved in supply chain management research. Linking the concept of relationship management in supply chains with triads as its unit of analysis, this study sets out to advance our knowledge on how a buyer can develop its supplier’s resilience capability to disruptions through horizontally linking two suppliers. The project goal is threefold: first, we seek to analyze the impact of supplier-supplier co-opetiton on the supplier’s resilience capability; second, we research the potentials for buying-firms to actively influence its suppliers’ horizontal relationship; and third, we seek to identify the sourcing levers of a buying-firm to effectively benefit from the resilience capability established at these suppliers. Triadic data from 90 buyer-supplier-supplier triads (i.e. 270 individual firm-observations) from manufacturing firms in DACH countries will be collected and used to test the various aspects of the proposed theoretical framework. The present project is only the second quantitative empirical study on supply chain triads and significant new theoretical and managerial implications can be expected. The project makes three important theoretical contributions to current academic literature. First, and foremost it seeks to validate the buyer’s ability to outsource its resilience capability to upstream supply chain partners and assesses tools to effectively source said capability. The findings of this study may provide a whole new perspective in terms of procurement decision criteria. Second, the study also validates the still emerging conception of supplier–supplier co-opetition in a disruption management context. It departs from the monadic and dyadic perspectives of current SCM research, along with its methodological and epistemological deficiencies, seeking to assert that supplier–supplier relationships do matter to a buyer. Third, it seeks to bring salience to the role of the buyer in building supplier–supplier relationships.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants