A Research Of Interfirm IT-enabled Collaborative Capability From Governance Mechanisms Perspective

With the increasingly fierce of the market competition environment, the competition of firms has developed into the competition of the supply chain. With the rapid development of IT technology and the Internet, as well as the advent of the emerging technologies, more and more firms are online-communicating and cooperating with each other through the Internet platform. At the same time, in this process, they gradually form IT-enabled collaborative capability, which include knowledge-sharing capability, inter-organizational coordination and operation capability, channel integrating capability and so on. These capabilities make firms and their partners work together to improve the existing collaborative activities, and form a long-term alliance, playing a crucial role in long-term competitive advantage to the firm. However, the formation of interfirm IT-enabled ability to cooperate not only need the support of IT technology, the Internet platform and other technical factors in the organization, but also is influenced by those managerial factors about the governance of the inter-organizational collaborative relationship, and exploring its establishment process needs to consider from the perspective of the combination of technical factors and management factors. Governance mechanisms include formal governance and relational governance, influencing the inter-organizational collaborative relationship from different aspects, the formal governance help to reduce the transaction costs of interfirm cooperation, to some extent, can also promote the establishment and maintenance of interfirm collaborative relationship, the relational governance is the important way to achieve the coordination between the technical factors and management factors,and they also can influence the application and implementation of the interfirm online collaboration. Therefore, this study takes into account technical factors and management factors, and to explore the mechanism of the formation of governance mechanisms on the interfirm IT-enabled collaborative ability, which is the application of interfirm e-commerce cooperation need to focus.Interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability research mostly focuses on the field of information systems and operations management. Inter-organizational IT-enabled collaborative ability is developed from the IT capabilities based on the Resource Based View (RBV) in the field of early IS, evolving from the original single firm to multi-firms areas. With the emergence of inter-organizational alliances, research scholars take the relational view into the inter-organizational IS application research, they think we not only need to take technical factor into account, but also the inter-organizational management factors, thus exploring the formation and the value of the IT-enabled collaborative ability will be one of the future research directions in the field of information systems. Many scholars in the field of operations management have proven that IT and e-commerce technology, which can promote the building of IT application capability in the firm operational level, have the important technology enabled effect on the interfirm coordination and cooperation. The scholars focus on solving the problem of the firms’ operational management level, and contributing to the change and innovation of the inter-organizational operation and management. However, the field of the operational management is lack of the overall and sufficient research about the use of integrating the technical resources with other non-technical resources in the process of the IT and e-business technology application, what’s more, there is no scholar from the perspective of integration of technical and management factors to deeply explore the characteristics and rules of construction of interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability.From the perspective of the combination of technical factors and administrative factors, this article explore the formation of the interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability, establish this study’s model framework, through interviews, questionnaires and other methods to collect data, based on the survey data of the200domestic firms, conduct empirical research using the statistical methods such as regression analysis, and using SPSS to test the reciprocal effect of the model. The two main conclusions as the following:1. The digital interactive capability, and two governance mechanisms (relational governance and formal governance) have a direct effect on the interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability at the same time. In the context of e-commerce cooperation, digital interactive capability is the essential basic conditions in the inter-organizational e-commerce cooperation, this study also introduces both formal governance and relational governance which are governance mechanisms, and find that they all affect the achievement of interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability. Predecessors have confirmed relational governance and formal governance can improve inter-organizational competitiveness and improve collaborative performance, and this study further explore its inner mechanism, is useful to understand the inherent rules of the firms’ cooperative performance affected by the governance mechanisms.2. In the process of building IT-enabled collaborative capability, firms should pay attention to the reciprocal effect between digital interactive capability and relational governance, that is, in the process of online collaboration, a good trustful relationship between the partners will give firms higher IT-enabled collaborative capability. Also note not to introduce a variety of governance mechanisms, otherwise it will cause a conflict, and be harmful to the formation of interfirm long-term friendly and cooperative relationship, it is because relational governance and formal governance are exclusive each other, and the study not only confirms that, but also further find that when the firm and its partners through the application of IT platforms or network media and other emerging technologies for online collaboration, it is necessary to choose using which governance mechanisms according to the state of their specific relationship, so as to be more useful to promote the formation of interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability, and to obtain the interfirm competitive advantage.The two point of innovation in this study are as following:1. This study considers that factors influencing interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability include not only technical factor but also management factor——governance mechanisms. Because interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability is a kind of cross-organizational e-business capability, whose formation involves interfirm cooperation relationship, and governance mechanisms have an important impact on the construction and improvement of interfirm cooperation relationship. Predecessors who study IT-enabled collaborative capability have not considered governance mechanisms’ impact on the construction of IT-enabled collaborative capability yet, and this paper enriches the correlation research.2. This paper uses empirical study approach to prove that interaction effect between digital interaction capability and two governance mechanisms have an impact on the construction of interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability, and the two governance mechanisms have mutual repulsion effect on each other. Thus, in favor of the construction of interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability, firms need to choose one of the two governance mechanisms according to the state of their specific relationship. This discovery not only complements the study about the adoption and implement of governance mechanisms in the operations management field, but also offers a base for exploring internal mechanism of governance mechanisms to firm cooperation performance deeply.In theory, this study complements the research about the correlative subjects of interfirm IT-enabled collaborative capability and governance mechanisms, and in practice, this study helps firm managers to overall consider technical and management factor to understand the implementation of interfirm e-business cooperation deeply, to understand how to handle the partnership to achieve the expect collaborative effects with partners, which provide practice guidance basis.