Sean M. Handley

Inter-organizational conflicts: Research overview, challenges, and opportunities

While inter-personal conflicts have attracted much attention from scholars and practitioners over the last two decades, our understanding of inter-organizational conflicts remains limited. This paper critically assesses current literature on inter-organizational conflicts. We first discuss the specific features of conflicts at the inter-organizational level. Second, we provide an overview of both qualitative and quantitative research conducted in the field. Third, we make suggestions for future research on inter-organizational conflicts. We specifically suggest opportunities to develop theoretical bridges with other streams of literature and to build multi-level models of conflict management. We then discuss important empirical issues associated with doing research on conflicts between organizations and provide recommendations to overcome these challenges.

Managing Quality in Outsourced Production: Construct Development and Measurement Validation

There exists a large body of academic and practitioner literature that has led to a deep understanding of the practices and behaviors necessary to manage quality within a firms own factory walls. However, the literature on the effectiveness of the approaches used by buyers to manage the quality of outsourced production is surprisingly scant. In this paper, the authors develop and evaluate scales that are necessary for academic research on the management of production outsourced to contract manufacturers (CMs). They use the existing empirical, analytical, and practitioner literature to generate and define relevant constructs. They develop new scales where necessary and adapt existing scales where possible to measure these constructs. They then follow a two-stage approach to assess their reliability and validity. In the first stage, the authors follow a rigorous item-sorting process to refine these scales. In the second stage, they employ factor analyses using data collected from 123 buyers and 100 CMs to formally assess multiple forms of reliability and validity; they find that most of their scales exhibit good psychometric properties and can be used for research. The authors conclude the paper with some suggestions for research on managing quality in outsourced production.

Managing Quality in a Heterogeneous Contract Manufacturing Environment

The outsourcing of production is a prominent strategy across industries. While the strategy can have many benefits, the popular press reports numerous examples of quality issues originating with contract manufacturers (CMs). Observing these quality issues, multiple scholars call for the quality management (QM) literature to be extended to explicitly address the challenges of managing quality in an inter-organizational context. Additionally, QM researchers recognize the need to consider contextual contingencies for the effectiveness of specific QM practices. Responding to these calls, we focus on the potential contingent factor of CM heterogeneity (i.e. the degree of product and process diversity at the CM plant). We first test the direct relationship between CM manufacturing heterogeneity and CM quality conformance performance, as reported by the CMs customers, brand-owning firms. Next, we evaluate the effectiveness of multiple practices that these brand-owning firms can employ to mitigate the anticipated negative effect of heterogeneity on their CMs conformance quality. We utilize paired dyadic data on 106 contract manufacturing relationships in the food, drug, and medical device industries to test our hypothesized model. The results of our analysis reveal a negative association between heterogeneity at CM facilities and their conformance quality performance. Our results also identify cooperative relationships, contractual coordination provisions, and formal performance assessment programs as practices that brand-owning firms can employ to largely eliminate the negative impact of heterogeneity on CMs’ conformance quality performance