Inter-organizational Factors, Coordination Mechanism Initiatives, and Performance: Study of Humanitarian Supply Chains

As a result of the dramatic increase in natural and man-made disaster losses, humanitarian practitioners and academicians are seeking effective and efficient means of minimizing the tremendous losses. Although various theoretical underpinnings are beneficial to understand the importance of supply chain in a humanitarian context, the management of coordination mechanism along the humanitarian supply chain has yet to be explored. This study seeks to examine the antecedents and outcomes of coordination mechanism to mitigate the coordination challenges. In particular, the inter-organizational factors (i.e. total perceived interdependence, supply chain visibility, and complementarity) are identified to evaluate their impact on coordination mechanism initiatives (i.e. resource sharing, standardization, informal coordination, incentive alignment, and synchronization) that are presumed to influence humanitarian supply chain performance concerting the moderating role of relief environmental uncertainty. Drawing on social network theory, interdependence theory, and contingency theory, a conceptual model is developed and tested using 101 samples from the humanitarian organizations across six countries in Southeast Asia. The Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis was conducted using smartPLS software version 2.0. The results reveal that supply chain visibility and complementarity are the major inter-organizational factors for effective
xvii coordination mechanism in a humanitarian context, while total perceived interdependence is found as not a significant factor for coordination of effort among the humanitarian organizations. Resource sharing and standardization affect significantly on humanitarian supply chain performance in terms of resource, output, flexibility and accountability. However, informal coordination, incentive alignment, and synchronization were determined as insignificant elements of coordination mechanism in the context of study. In addition to that, the moderating role of relief environmental uncertainty weakens the impact of resource sharing and synchronization on performance, while it strengthens the effect of standardization and informal coordination on performance. Based on the major findings, the discussions, contributions (i.e. theoretical, practical, and methodological) and limitations of the study are provided in details for the conclusion.