Purpose – This paper aims to examine the relationship between competitive capabilities, including flexibility and collaboration between logistics service providers (LSPs) and their customers, and relationship quality, as measured by trust, dependence and commitment. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 309 logistics managers were invited to participate in this study and structural equation modeling was performed to analyze the measurement and structural models. Findings – The results show that both flexibility and collaboration positively influence trust and dependence. Moreover, dependence does not appear to influence commitment. Finally, we hypothesize and find that trust plays an important role in the research model and positively increase commitment. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation of this study is that this study used a cross-sectional survey approach to collect data on all research variables. Compared with longitudinal data, cross-sectional data might not be able to demonstrate completely the temporal sequence of the antecedents and consequences, which might result in spurious cause–effect inferences. Practical implications – Our findings offer several important implications for LSPs. First, our findings imply that LSPs need to make their customers want to share useful information related to operations and logistics. Second, flexibility plays an important role in forming customers’ trust in logistics service industry. Originality/value – Little research has done on combining a resource-based view and relationship marketing together in logistics service context. Therefore, this study advances the resource-based view and relationship marketing and adds value to the literature by demonstrating the applicability of the observed relationships among LSPs.

Introduction

Owing to the proliferation of the lean philosophy in industries and the emergence of many professional logistics service providers (LSPs), the outsourcing of logistics operations in recent years has grown rapidly in the business environment, making the logistics service industry increasingly competitive (Wallenburg, 2009; Yu, et al., 2017). To differentiate themselves and survive among competition, LSPs need to implement effective competitive strategies to outperform their competitors (i.e., competitive capabilities) and obtain sustainable competitive advantages (Davis, et al., 2008; Huemer, 2012). The resource-based view (RBV) is one of the dominant approaches to the analysis of sustained competitive advantage (Lin and Wu, 2014; Wang and Sengupta, 2016). According to the RBV, valuable, inimitable, nontransferable and nonsubstitutable (or unique) resources owned by a firm determine competitive advantages (Lin and Wu, 2014). In the context of logistics service industry, both flexibility and collaboration facilitated by communication between LSPs and their customers have been identified as important competitive capabilities that form a firm’s core capabilities in gaining competitive advantages (Hartmann and De Grahl, 2011; Liao, et al., 2010; Yu, et al., 2017). Specifically, flexibility is critical, because with unanticipated adjustments and/or quick requests from customers, LSPs require flexibility to deal with a variety of changes in fast-paced markets. Such a high level of flexibility creates value for LSPs’ customers and makes LSPs different from the competition (Hartmann and De Grahl, 2011; Olavarrieta and Ellinger, 1997; Wong and Karia, 2010; Yu, et al., 2017). Additionally, collaboration between LSPs and their customers is essential, because effective collaboration generates useful information between the two, helping LSPs better understand their customers and resulting in customers more willing to work together (Qu and Yang, 2015). Indeed, when collaboration becomes more frequent, a shared goal (e.g., maximizing profit) between LSPs and their customers is more likely to be built. Such a tight relationship decreases threats from competition and thereby grants competitive advantages (Hartmann and De Grahl, 2011; Qu and Yang, 2015; Wong and Karia, 2010).