Relationships Among Supply Chain Management, Strategic Alliances, and Organizational Performance with Implications for the Construction Industry

The purposes of this non-experimental, mixed method, predominantly quantitative, descriptive, comparative (exploratory), and correlational (explanatory and predictive) study are to examine the relationships among supply chain management, strategic alliances, and organizational performance with an emphasis on the construction industry, to investigate whether establishing strategic alliances assists the execution of supply chain management and further enhances organizational performance including competitive advantages for achieving success and benefits of the alliance, and to examine whether alliance manager characteristics, organizational characteristics, and dimensions of alliance influence the success of the alliance by testing six hypotheses. Sources of literature used and data searches are based on the ProQuest database in the Lynn University Library. Purposive, simple random approach, and snowball sampling plans were designed to obtain a sample of 3,434 construction alliance managers who were engaged in strategic alliances under supply chain management in US-based contractor companies from the Engineering News Record (ENR) and the Blue Book of Building and Constructionresulting in a valid sample of 150 responses. All scales in this study were examined for reliability and construct validity. Four scales in this study were modified after exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Independent t-tests and ANOVA were used to answer the three exploratory research questions. Hierarchical (enter) linear regression analyses tested the six explanatory hypotheses. Findings indicated that (a) attributes of the alliance (trust & coordination and commitment from the mostlleast successful alliance), communication behavior (information quality from the most successful alliance, information sharing, information participation, and proprietary information sharing), conflict resolution techniques (avoidance & constructive and destructive), and commodity/supplier selection process explained a range of 65.1% to 80.7% of the variation in the success of the alliance (total score); (b) alliance manager characteristics (education level), organizational characteristics (alliance training programs), attributes of the alliance (trust & coordination, commitment from the least/most successful alliance), communication behavior (information quality from the most successful alliance, information sharing, information participation, and proprietary information sharing), conflict resolution techniques (avoidance & constructive and destructive), and commodity/supplier selection process explained a range of 62.8% to 65.8% of the variation in the success of the alliance (total score); (c) Content validity, construct validity, convergent validity, and internal consistency reliability of the new organizational performance scale were established; and (d) alliance training programs have a positive influence on attributes of alliance, commodity/supplier selection process, dimensions of alliances (total score), satisfaction with the alliance based on past success, internal-business-process perspective performance, and success of the alliance (total score). Future research can explore the relationships among conflict management, strategic alliances, and organizational performance in different industries or countries, and fkther focus on the effects of negotiation methods and cultural sensitivity on strategic alliances in terms of organizational performance.