Matthew W. McCarter

Benefits, barriers, and bridges to effective supply chain management

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to provide academics and practitioners a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the benefits, barriers, and bridges to successful collaboration in strategic supply chains. Design/methodology/approach – A triangulation method consisting of a literature review, a cross‐functional mail survey, and 51 in‐depth case analyses was implemented. Senior managers from purchasing, manufacturing, and logistics were targeted in the mail survey. The break down by channel category interviews is as follows: 14 retailers, 13 finished goods assemblers, 12 first‐tier suppliers, three lower‐tier suppliers, and nine service providers. Findings – Customer satisfaction and service is perceived as more enduring than cost savings. All managers recognize technology, information, and measurement systems as major barriers to successful supply chain collaboration. However, the people issues – such as culture, trust, aversion to change, and willingness to collaborate – are more intractable. People are the key bridge to successful collaborative innovation and should therefore not be overlooked as companies invest in supply chain enablers such as technology, information, and measurement systems. Research limitations/implications – The average mail‐survey response rate was relatively low: 23.5 percent. The case study analyses were not consistent in frequency across channel functions. Although the majority of companies interviewed and surveyed were international, all surveys and interviews were managers based in the US. Practical implications – This study provides new insight into understanding the success and hindering factors of supply chain management. The extensive literature review, the cross‐channel analysis, and case studies provide academics and managers a macro picture of the goals, challenges, and strategies for implementing supply chain management. Originality/value – This paper uses triangulation methodology for examining key issues of supply chain management at multiple levels within the supply chain.

Information sharing and supply chain performance: the role of connectivity and willingness

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how information technology (IT) is used to enhance supply chain performance.Design/methodology/approach – A large‐scale survey and semi‐structured interviews were used to collect industry data.Findings – Two distinct dimensions to information sharing – connectivity and willingness – are identified and analyzed. Both dimensions are found to impact operational performance and to be critical to the development of a real information sharing capability. However, many companies are found to have placed most of their emphasis on connectivity, often overlooking the willingness construct. As a result, information sharing seldom delivers on its promise to enable the creation of the cohesive supply chain team.Research limitations – Despite the extensive data collection, the research represents a snapshot of practice. Replication from a longitudinal perspective would help define how IT is evolving to enable supply chain management.Practical implications – A roadmap...

Why supply chain collaboration fails: the socio-structural view of resistance to relational strategies

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to elaborate theory regarding the reasons why collaboration strategies fail. The relational view posits that supply chain integration can be a source of competitive advantage. Few firms, however, successfully co-create value to attain supernormal relational rents. Design/methodology/approach – This study uses a quasi-longitudinal, multi-case interview methodology to explore the reasons why collaboration strategies fail to deliver intended results. The authors interviewed managers at 49 companies in Period 1 and managers at 57 companies in Period 2. In all, 15 companies participated in both rounds of interviews. Findings – This study builds and describes a taxonomy of relational resistors. The authors then explore how sociological and structural resistors reinforce each other to undermine collaborative behavior. Specifically, the interplay among resistors: obscures the true sources of resistance; exacerbates a sense of vulnerability to non-collaborative behavior that ...

Supply chain alliances and social dilemmas: bridging the barriers that impede collaboration

Strategic Supply Chain Management (SCM) creates and maintains collective gains through appropriate alliance relationships, which often require initial investments in an uncertain environment. The development of such relationships may be hindered because, as a form of strategic alliance, Supply Chain (SC) alliances are social dilemmas. This paper uses the social dilemma perspective and data gathered from mail survey and case study methodologies to report how strategic SC relationships navigate social dilemmas to collaboratively create and maintain collective gains.

Divided Loyalists or Conditional Cooperators? Creating Consensus About Cooperation in Multiple Simultaneous Social Dilemmas

The current social dilemma literature lacks theoretical consensus regarding how individuals behave when facing multiple simultaneous social dilemmas. The divided-loyalty hypothesis, from organizational theory, predicts that cooperation will decline as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. The conditional-cooperation hypothesis, from behavioral economics, predicts that cooperation will increase as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. We employ a laboratory experiment to create consensus between these literatures and find support for the conditional-cooperation hypothesis. The positive effect of interacting with different group members comes from participants having an opportunity to shift their cooperative behavior from the less cooperative to the more cooperative group.

The Role of the Decision-Making Regime on Cooperation in a Workgroup Social Dilemma: An Examination of Cyberloafing

A burgeoning problem facing organizations is the loss of workgroup productivity due to cyberloafing. The current paper examines how changes in the decision-making rights about what workgroup members can do on the job affect cyberloafing and subsequent work productivity. We compare two different types of decision-making regimes: autocratic decision-making and group voting. Using a laboratory experiment to simulate a data-entry organization, we find that, while autocratic decision-making and group voting regimes both curtail cyberloafing (by over 50%), it is only in group voting that there is a substantive improvement (of 38%) in a cyberloafer’s subsequent work performance. Unlike autocratic decision-making, group voting leads to workgroups outperforming the control condition where cyberloafing could not be stopped. Additionally, only in the group voting regime did production levels of cyberloafers and non-loafers converge over time.

It’s a game of give and take: Modeling behavior in a give-or-take-some social dilemma

We investigate a new give-or-take-some (GOTS) dilemma paradigm that merges traditional give-some and take-some dilemmas. In this hybrid social dilemma, individuals can choose to give or to take resources from a shared resource pool. Previous empirical work by McCarter, Budescu, and Scheffran (2011) found that the composition of the group and the individuals’ endowments influenced their tendency to give and/or take. We reanalyze results from two experiments from McCarter, Budescu, et al. (2011) using the new paradigm and propose a simple model of individual behavior based on the players’ perceptions of their relative standing in the group and their perception of fair allocations. We also use these data to fit the model at the individual level and use it to provide a general framework for interpreting the group results.

Behavioural issues in supply chain collaboration: communicating the literature via interactive learning

Technological innovation enables modern Supply Chain Management (SCM). The willingness to reassess the roles and behaviours of management is required to unleash the true creative power of SCM. Unfortunately, most managers and business educators have focused more on quantitative and technical aspects of SCM than on creating an environment that supports systems thinking and holistic decision making. Without redefining the system, collaboration will not occur at levels needed to create the learning SC. To help managers and educators make a closer examination at collaborative behaviour, we review the literature and illustrate its theory through an interactive simulation that demonstrates the need to go beyond technology to culture and structure to establish a truly collaborative SC model. One unique benefit of this approach is the simulation can be run first hand to support the literature and provide the significant emotional event needed to promote the needed paradigm shift to true SC collaboration.

Land assembly with taxes, not takings

ABSTRACT We use a novel tax mechanism – ‘rejected offer reassessment’ (ROR) – in laboratory experiments to discourage seller holdout and facilitate land assembly. Under this mechanism, if a landowner rejects a developer’s offer, his taxable property value is reassessed to be equal to the rejected offer, increasing his taxes. We find that, relative to a control treatment, ROR discourages the magnitude of seller holdout (but not its frequency) and increases the rate of successful land assembly by almost 60%. It also increases the gains from trade by 22.1% relative to the control treatment, but the difference is not statistically significant.

Land Assembly Without Eminent Domain: Laboratory Experiments of Two Tax Mechanisms

We use laboratory experiments to test the ability of two self-assessment tax mechanisms to discourage seller holdout and facilitate land assembly. Each mechanism requires a seller to declare a price at which he is willing to sell his property. The incentive to overstate the value is mitigated by using the declared price to assess a property tax. The incentive to understate the value is mitigated by allowing developers to buy the property at the declared price. One tax mechanism uses tax formula that is complex to calculate but incentive compatible to elicit sellers’ true reservation values. The second uses a flat tax rate that is easy to implement but not incentive compatible. We find that sellers overstate their reservation values under both tax mechanisms. Nevertheless, both mechanisms increase the rate of successful land assembly by 67% and the gains from trade by more than 120% relative to a control treatment. Given their equal performance, the flat tax rate seems the best option given the easy of its implementation.