Buyer participation in outsourced new product development projects: The role of relationship multiplexity

Abstract

In business markets, firms increasingly participate in new product development (NPD) activities that they outsource to suppliers. Such buyer participation can be complicated by relationship multiplexity-that is, the buyer may simultaneously be a competitor, supplier, and/or partner of the supplier firm. Drawing on role theory, we theorize how relationship multiplexity moderates the effect of buyer participation on project success. We analyze 140 NPD projects that were executed by a contract R&D organization in the aerospace industry and find that buyer participation lowers the buyer's and the supplier's perceptions of project success for buyer-as-supplier multiplexity. Buyer participation increases the perceptions of project success in the case of buyer-as-partner multiplexity, but only when these partnerships are emergent, as opposed to engineered. Buyer participation decreases the buyer's perception of project success for relationships featuring buyer-as-competitor multiplexity but does not affect the supplier's perception in the case of buyer-as-competitor multiplexity. Our results provide tactical insights as to when buyer participation helps or hurts.

How Coopetition Influences Environmental Performance: Role of Financial Slack, Leverage, and Leanness

“…In doing so, we conceptualize and test a model that answers these research questions: 1) to what extent does the coopetitors’ environmental performance influence a focal firm’s environmental performance; and 2) what is the role of a focal firm’s financial resources (i.e., financial slack and financial leverage), and leanness in the relationship between coopetitor firms’ and focal firm’s environmental performance? Furthermore, previous research in operations management has not compared single‐role relationships (such as competitive or cooperative ties) to multiplex relationships (such as coopetition) (Slot, Wuyts, and Geyskens, 2020) on a focal firm’s environmental performance. Thus, we take this opportunity to compare the influence of competitors, suppliers, and coopetitors’ environmental performance on a focal firm’s environmental performance 2…”

Thinking alike or not: Performance implications of transactional psychological contract congruence in buyer–supplier new product development projects

“…We used 10,000 times bootstrap to construct confidence intervals for these critical features using the percentile method with bias correction. Given our samples are nested within seven buyers and 116 suppliers, which might be involved in more than one project, we addressed clustered observations by using a two-way robust clustered-error term procedure, with buyers and suppliers as the clustering dimensions (Cameron et al, 2011;Slot et al, 2020).…”

“…Second, we conducted an independent sample t test for key variables, which indicated no significant difference between the first and last quarter of the 216 responses from Alpha (e.g., t = À1.23 for supplier TPC). Third, our focus was on nonlinear interaction effects, which are less subject to social desirability bias because it is unlikely that informants will respond based on a mindset armed with interaction-based theory (Slot et al, 2020).…”

“…Finally, to alleviate memory bias, in the project identification stage, we asked respondents to include only projects that were completed in the last three to 4 years (Slot et al, 2020). Further, we used archival data whenever possible, which is less subject to memory bias.…”

“…We then aggregated the two ratings into a single score. There is increasing evidence to suggest that single-item measures have adequate reliability and validity levels, particularly for a construct that has a clear object and a clear attribute (such as quality) (Slot et al, 2020). Development efficiency was measured by two numeric items.…”