| Supply chain flexibility has emerged as an important strategy for achieving competitive advantages. This study represents one empirical effort to develop a conceptual framework of supply chain flexibility and explore the complex relationships among the antecedents, driving forces, supply chain flexibility, and its impacts on performance.;Valid and reliable measures of supply flexibility, logistics flexibility, spanning flexibility, and outsourcing were developed. The instrument development process involved an extensive review of literature, structured interviews with practitioners and evaluations with experts in the field, a pilot study, and a large-scale survey. The large-scale survey yielded 201 responses from supply chain/purchasing/operations/logistics executives. Structural equation modeling (AMOS) methodology was used to test the causal relationships between constructs.;The research results support the hypotheses that higher levels of supply chain practices will lead to improved supply chain flexibility, and improved supply chain flexibility further will bring about improved performance. It also supports the direct relationship between environmental uncertainty and supply chain flexibility.;The results of this study have several important implications for practitioners. Postponement, information flow facilitation, and supplier management are supply chain practices that an organization may consider to adopt to improve different aspects of supply chain flexibility. A set of valid and reliable measurements developed in this study enable the companies to evaluate supply chain flexibility, and further benchmark across different companies. Moreover, the findings also imply that fast changes in supply side, customer demand, technology, and competition drive companies to implement supply chain strategy to achieve competitive advantages.;Directions and recommendations for future research include refinement of construct definition and measurement items for revalidation; examination of the relationship between supply chain flexibility and overall supply chain performance in a variety of industry settings to confirm a generalized flexibility - performance linkage; and examination of the proposed relationships by bringing some contextual variables into the model, such as organizational size and supply chain structure. |
