مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد اعتماد به عملکرد رابطه خارجی – الزویر 2019

Drawing on the perspectives of interfirm governance mechanisms, we develop a contingency theoretical framework that examines how contract specificity and trust interact with local suppliers’ physical asset specificity and human asset specificity in shaping the relationship performance of offshore cooperation between local suppliers and global buyers. The empirical data for hypothesis testing were collected from a survey of 162 dyads composed of Chinese local suppliers and international buyers. The empirical results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between physical asset specificity and relationship performance, and this inverted U-shaped relationship is stronger when the level of contract specificity is higher. There is a linear and positive relationship between human asset specificity and relationship performance, and this relationship becomes stronger when the level of trust between the local supplier and international buyer is higher.

Introduction

Firms in developed countries have increasingly outsourced their value-added activities from local suppliers in emerging countries in the form of offshore buyer–supplier cooperation. The success of this offshore buyer–supplier cooperation may depend on how well the relationship between the two partners goes (Bertrand & Mol, 2013). Among the various factors that explain relationship performance in offshore cooperation, asset specificity – nonredeployable specific investments that are dedicated to such relationships (Hoetker & Mellewigt, 2009) – has been identified as a primary determinant by prior studies (De Vita & Tekaya, 2015; Wu, Chen, Chen, & Tung, 2016). However, whether asset specificity facilitates or hinders relationship performance remains inconclusive in the literature. Some scholars postulate that such investments can lose at least part of their value if the transactional relationship was terminated because this type of investment is often designed for a particular transaction and shifting it to other businesses is difficult (Williamson, 1991), in turn hindering relationship performance (Liu, Liu, & Li, 2014).