Organisational support: an empirical investigation into the effect of organisational support on the success of emerging market sourcing
Original Paper
First online: 03.02.2009
DOI: 10.1007/s12159-009-0010-0
Cite this article as: Beckmann, T., Lindemann, P. & Straube, F. Logist. Res. (2009) 1: 27. doi:10.1007/s12159-009-0010-0
Abstract
“Global Sourcing” has received a great deal of attention recently, as companies strive for new sources of competitive advantage in the face of increasing global competition. Alongside the undisputed role that supplier management plays in assuring sourcing success, organisational aspects can also be shown to play an important part in the field of global sourcing. This paper is a first systematic attempt to identify the factors that can successfully promote the execution of sourcing projects in “emerging markets”. The success factors are derived from the literature of related areas of research. The analysis adopts an internal perspective, although external factors residing in the relationship with the supplier and the external environment are indirectly taken into account by incorporating research on project and innovation management—both very flexible approaches for highly uncertain environments. The findings allow the identification of clearly relevant success factors in sourcing from emerging markets and are integrated in a model designed to explain the impact of organisational support in this venture. The partial least squares method (PLS) is used to test the model on a set of 96 cases. The data originates from a survey of sourcing managers from Europe, mainly in the manufacturing and automotive industries.
Keywords
Emerging market sourcing Organisational support Project management Global sourcing