Interorganizational Coordination Relationship In Condition Of Environmental Uncertainty

Facing the globalization and complex and dynamic business environment, enterprises must respond and manage their environment in order to be competitive. When an enterprise faces complex and uncertain environment, as compared with simple and stable environment, the decision makers must handle more information since more coordinations, with its suppliers and business partners, are needed. From the viewpoint of information processing, an enterprise must coordinate with its suppliers tightly to cope with the changing environment, and under this situation, collecting and processing information is an important task for the enterprise.The coordination between buyers and suppliers needs an effective theory foundation to carry through the academic research. System theory and Organization Theory contribute to the research development in the literature review, and further development of Viable System Model (VSM) and Information-Processing Theory are valuable to organizational research.This study aims to make contributions to both theoretical development and managerial practices. By applying VSM and Information Processing Theory (IPT) to practice and embedded multiple-case study method, this study is designed to make the following contributions:1. Applying the law of requisite variety and VSM to managerial practice, and ratifying the undiscovered relationships of factors in IPT related research literature.By empirically studying in social economic system, this study contributes to theory development of Cybernetics: applying Cybernetics to a specific managerial practice; expanding research method to system recursion, system functional definitions, and variety balance; testifying the reasonability of Ashby's law and VSM and providing methodology of applying Cybernetics.This study also discovers further relationships between information processing need (IPN) and information processing capability (IPC) and between two ways of improving organizational IPC that was not clearly explained by IPT related studies, which contribute to IPT's theory development.2. By case study in Chinese typical enterprises, this study discovers the relationships between organizational environmental uncertainty, interorganizational coordination(IOC), interorganizational IT application, and the effectiveness of interorganizational coordination.Applying embedded multiple-cases study, data was collected from four large-scale automobile manufacturing companies and two large-scale shipbuilding companies in China. Three level of data analysis show the following findings: the higher the environement uncertainty, the higher the requirement for interorganizational coordination; environmental uncertainty has no direct influence on IT application; IT application is significantly relevant to IOC; performance is determinded by IT application and the management of interorganizational coordination. Results show some implications for interorganizational structure, processing and IOS design.3. Implication of managerial practice value and testifying practical validity of VSM and IPT is inferred by data analysis in case study.Technical uncertainty and demand uncertainty are improtant factors that show significant relationship to interorganizational coordiantion, and Managerial System grounding on VSM's systematic theory can treat environmental uncertainty effectively; IT application is determinded by charactors of IOC, and IOS implementation between two companies should be commenced by powerful one; interorganizational IT application can improve interorganizational performance, and it has potential improvement to performance if it was planed elaborately. VSM statement on how to achieve best performance is proved to fit the managerial practice by data analysis, i.e., more vareity managerial system shows, better performance organization can attain.