| Today’s enterprises are facing constantly increasing challenges stimulated by fierce market competition, frequent demand changes, and rapid technological progress. This critical situation has led to a higher requirement to improve enterprise agility. Agility is the capbility (including sensing and responsing) of enterprises to accurately identify and understand the changes in the business environment, to grasp the opportunities, and to make quick and effective response by dynamically adjusting its internal and external resources. Enhance enterprises agility demand co-ordination from supply chain partners, and support by interorganizational information systems (also known as "Interorganizational System", IOS), and yet, supply chain resource dependence accompanied by IOS also restricts enterprise agility. So, the enterprises are facing the dilemma of establishing supply chain partnership to improve agility, but subject to the resource dependence. However, Literatures seldom discuss on this issue. Therefore, this paper focus on upgrading of enterprise agility, and research effect and mechanism of IOS Flexibility and supply chain resources dependence acting on enterprise agility and performance.Based on dynamic capability theory and resource dependence theory, and referenced capability hierarchy framework, the paper builds a factor model of enterprise agility. It sees agility as specific reflection of dynamic capability in the turbulent environment, which is divided into two dimensions including sensing and responding capabilities. The model proposes that resource dependence advantage in supply chain impact negatively on both sensing capability and responding capability, whereas IOS flexibility impact positively on these two capabilities. Moreover, these capabilities have positive influence on enterprise performance, IOS flexibility also moderate the relationships between dependence advantage and these capabilities.After empirical study of354samples, it finds that:1) the two capabilities of agility, as organization’s high-order capabilities, are significantly associated with enterprise performance, and mediated the relationships between IOS flexibility/dependence advantage and enterprise performance;2) the alignment of sensing capability and responding capability contributes positively to enterprise performance;3) resource dependence have a significant disadvantage to agility and performance;4) IOS flexibility is a foundational capability that indirectly contributes to value creating by enabling greater agility, and also alleviates the negative impact of resource dependence advantage on responding capability.This paper reveals the mechanism of supply chain resource dependence and IOS flexibility acting on enterprise agility and performance, and provides a theoretical guidance for enterprises practice activities. It indicates that dependence advantage of supply chain in a turbulent environment will not only fail to enhance the competitiveness of enterprises, but also will damage their performance by reducing business agility. It is because that each firm gaining a competitive advantage must rely on the support from supply chain partners, rather than to "plunder" interests of upstream or downstream firms. The study also pointed out that, IOS flexible can reduce asset specificity and the imbalance of power, so as to alleviate the negative impact of supply chain resource dependence advantage on agility. In addition, we also found that when responding capability is low, to separately upgrade sensing will not improve business performance. So only when enterprises synchronously enhance both of them, the enterprise can achieve better competitive performance.
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