This research empirically examines the importance of knowledge management processes to operational and overall organizational performance (OPERF). Specifically, results indicate that a shared interpretation of knowledge among operational personnel mediates how knowledge is disseminated and used to design and implement a unified operational response to that knowledge. Further, results collected in a logistics operations (LO) context support a strong positive relationship between this knowledge management process and operational and organizational performance. Importantly, psychometric measures for organizational performance collected from managerial respondents were strongly correlated with secondary financial data for participating firms obtained from Compustat, thus supporting a link about operational performance and hard organizational performance data.

Many firms now place emphasis on leveraging logistics capabilities as a source of competitive advantage. This manuscript suggests that the key to sustaining this competitive position is through adopting learning principles in logistics. As such, a logistics learning capability framework is presented, including the components of an effective learning‐based logistics organization. Research propositions, an in‐depth case study and implications are presented to further support the learning capability framework suggested and highlight the importance of learning in today's hypercompetitive global supply chain environment.

There is growing interest from industry and academic disciplines regarding coordination in supply chains, particularly addressing coordination mechanisms available to eliminate sub‐optimization within supply chains. However, there is a disconnect between what is known in academic research about coordination mechanisms and what mechanisms practitioners apply and consider useful. This research fills a gap in the literature by conducting an in‐depth qualitative study of supply chain coordination mechanisms, primarily price, non‐price, and flow coordination mechanisms. Results suggest that: (1) managers prefer flow coordination mechanisms over price and non‐price coordination mechanisms; (2) supply chain orientation and learning orientation are important for the implementation of flow coordination mechanisms; and (3) technology, capital, and volume are not pre‐requisites for flow coordination mechanisms.