Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons^™

Enhancing Dyadic Performance Through Boundary Spanners And Innovation: An Assessment Of Service Provider–Customer Relationships, Scott J. Grawe, Patricia J. Daughterty, Peter M. Ralston

Peter Ralston

Firms recognize that working together through collaborative relationships offers potential benefits such as improving cooperation, information sharing, and overall performance. An additional and extremely valuable benefit of working together is the potential for creating innovative business approaches and solutions. Thus, developing external linkages has become a higher priority within many organizations. Boundary spanning employees offer one means of achieving closer cross‐firm relationships. We investigate the roles of boundary spanners by examining service providers and their relationships with customers. More specifically, we examine boundary spanning employees that are physically on‐site at customer facilities. Results provide strong support that boundary spanners perceiving …

Intra-Organizational Communication, Understanding, And Process Diffusion In Logistics Service Providers, Scott J. Grawe, Peter M. Ralston

Peter Ralston

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate, using survey data, how a firm may be able to leverage innovation or processes specifically developed for one customer across its entire customer network using onsite, or implanted, employees.

Design/methodology/approach – Data collected from a survey of 309 implanted logistics service provider (LSP) representatives are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Findings – The findings show that intra-organizational task interdependence and face-to-face communication can lead to a greater understanding of firm processes developed for specific customers and greater diffusion of these new processes to other customers. Rather than separating customers that …

Factor Market Myopia: A Driver Of Factor Market Revalry, Peter Ralston, Steven Lemay, Rose Opengart

Peter Ralston