Impact of Buyer-Supplier Cooperation in Buyer and Supplier Relationships: Insights from Indian Industries

The supply chain management literature emphasizes the need and importance of Supply Management Orientation (SMO) and its impact on Supplier Performance (SP) and Buyer Performance (BP). The constructs of the SMO impacting SP and BP and some of the hypotheses relating to SMO, BP and SP have been tested in Indian Industries too. In all these studies, the Buyer-Supplier Cooperation was hardly studied. Very few studies have focused on the cooperation from behavioral angles and studied various dimensions such as teamwork, trust, unity, co-ordination and respect. An attempt is made here in this paper to address this gap by developing an instrument backed by extensive literature review to capture the cooperation dimensions as part of the SMO construct to study the impact on SP and BP. It is termed as “COURTESY”- an acronym covering the aspects of Cooperation, Openness, Unity, Responsiveness, Trust, Experimentation, Sentiments, and Yielding (Flexibility). An empirical research is undertaken to test the reliability of the instrument. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is done to verify if all the factors in CFA is the same as what is expected. Also an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is done to find out the possible dimensions to compare with the CFA. Finally a perception graph between buyer and supplier is attempted for all the dimensions of cooperation and the gap between them is identified to formulate action plans.