Relationship Quality,Alliance Capability And The Performance Of Strategic Alliance:Research On China's Logistics Enterprise Alliance

With the deepening of market competition and the rapid development of network economy,individual company is unable to grasp the latest market information and technical knowledge and cannot meet the rapid growth of customer demands perfectly.Thus,strategic alliances are gradually becoming an important way for enterprises to improve market competitiveness and profitability.In order to meet the increasingly personalized,diversified customer needs,it is more and more prominent for logistics enterprises to build a strategic alliance in the process of sustainable development of logistics industry in China.However,the logistics enterprise alliance in China is still at the stage of exploration,and some alliances cannot achieve ideal synergy effect and get the desired performance.Therefore,how to improve the performance of logistics enterprises strategic alliance has been the focus of the academics.As for the influence factors of strategic alliance performance,the existing researches have been analyzing from various perspectives such as industrial organization,transaction cost,resource-based theory,social network,organizational learning and relationship quality and so on.Where,the relationship quality among the alliance enterprises is taken more seriously.At present,the analysis of influencing factors on the performance of logistics enterprise alliance and the research on this problem from the perspective of relationship quality are still lacking.On this account,taking the relationship quality as the cutting point,the paper discusses the effect of the relationship quality among the logistics alliance members on the strategic alliance performance and explores its internal mechanism and external adjustment factor further.The main contents and conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)Firstly,focusing on the relationship among the relationship quality of alliance logistics enterprises,alliance capability,alliance performance and environmental dynamics,the paper exploits three different logistics enterprises strategic alliance cases to put forward the preliminary theoretical hypothesis through the exploratory case analysis.(2)On the basis of above exploratory preliminary hypothesis,combining with the systematic study of existing research,this paper analyses the influence of the relationship quality on logistics alliance performance and studies the intermediary effect of the alliance capability on the relationship between relationship quality and alliance performance in order to discover the internal mechanism.The paper characterizes the relationship quality of strategic alliance by trust,commitment,communication and cooperation,and divides the alliance ability into cooperative control ability,learning ability and operational ability,and then puts forward theoretical hypothesis about the relationship among the relationship quality,alliance capabilities and alliance performance.The paper collects data through questionnaire,and test the relevant hypothesis by reliability tests,validity tests,factor analysis and structural equation modeling.The result shows that the relationship quality among the members of the logistics alliance is positively related to the alliance performance,where,trust,commitment and communication are more significant than cooperation.Moreover,trust,commitment and communication work for alliance performance through coalition control ability,learning ability and operational capacity as a total intermediary role simultaneously,while collaboration works for alliance performance through cooperative control capability as a partial mediating role.(3)From the contingency perspective,combined with the previous research,this paper discusses the adjustment mechanism of alliance environment dynamics towards the impact of relationship quality on alliance performance,and puts forward the corresponding hypothesis.Based on the questionnaire survey data,the empirical test was carried out by the multi-level hierarchical regression analysis.The result shows that environmental dynamics takes negative moderating effect towards the promoting effect of trust and commitment on logistics alliance performance,while its moderating effect towards the promoting effect of communication and cooperation on logistics alliance performance is not obvious.Based on the above theoretical and empirical research,combined with development of logistics enterprises strategic alliance in China,the paper proposes the following countermeasures:promote the relationship management actively among the logistics alliance enterprises,implement the long-term alliance strategy based on capacity enhancement and avoid the negative influence caused by the external environment dynamics positively.These advices provide decision-making references for the smooth implementation of China's logistics enterprises strategic alliance and the achievement of expected alliance performance.