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Do professional service firms benefit from customer and supplier collaborations in competitive, turbulent environments?

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 17:44 authored by Heirati, N, O'Cass, A, Schoefer, K, Siahtiri, V
Although recent research on business-to-business professional service firms (PSFs) emphasizes the role and consequences of collaboration with business partners, we know little regarding the conditions under which bright-side benefits of PSF interfirm collaboration turn into dark-side drawbacks. Our study shows that customer and supplier collaborations have both bright and dark sides, and their benefits with respect to helping a PSF to drive service performance are contingent on the levels of the environmental competition and turbulence. In particular, we show that increasing levels of competitive intensity and environmental turbulence encountered by a PSF can diminish the capacity of customer and supplier collaborations to drive service performance. When the level of competitive intensity increases, the benefits of customer collaboration become more positive; however, the dark-side of supplier collaboration becomes more pronounced, which negatively influences service performance. When the level of environmental turbulence increases, the dark-side of customer and supplier collaborations becomes more critical and the benefits derived from interfirm collaboration to promote service performance can be lost.

History

Publication title

Industrial Marketing Management

Volume

55

Pagination

50-58

ISSN

0019-8501

Department/School

TSBE

Publisher

Elsevier Inc

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

Crown Copyright 2016 Elsevier Inc.

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Marketing