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

Nima Heirati*, Aron O'Cass, Klaus Schoefer, Vida Siahtiri

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

85 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)50-58
Number of pages9
JournalIndustrial Marketing Management
Volume55
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2016
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Competitive intensity
  • Customer collaboration
  • Environmental turbulence
  • Partial least squares
  • Professional service firms
  • Service performance
  • Supplier collaboration

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