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Introduction
With increasing influence of material and components on the manufacturing competitiveness (Asmus and Griffin, 1993), more attention has been focused on the relationship with world-class suppliers (Keough, 1993). Moreover, as the complexity and uncertainty of procurement activities of manufacturers has been deepened, the supply management has become increasingly important (Kraljic, 1983) and the competition between firms has been shaped into competition between supply chains on a global scale (Ketchen and Hult, 2007). Thus, companies have been required to adjust their strategy to "the new competition" to gain competitive advantages (Speckman et al. , 1994). Increasingly, firms have searched for ways to maximize output through collaboration with supply chain partners in response to a number of strategic challenges, such as shortening product life cycle, rapid changes in product and/or process technologies and increased uncertainty in supply and demand. In fact, firms rely on suppliers for gaining and sustaining innovation, quality, cost and delivery competitiveness (Hahn et al. , 1990). A number of firms have changed their managerial behavior from a zero-sum competition-based relationship toward a long-term partnership-based collaboration (Zhao et al. , 2008; Flynn et al. , 2010). Both academics and business managers have made considerable efforts in search for effective purchasing sourcing practices. For example, Japanese single-sourcing strategy with long-term commitment by buyer and supplier was preferably exemplified and studied in comparison to multiple-sourcing practices with arms-length relationship (Presutti, 1992). However, an imbalance in bargaining power exists among partners in the supply chain, which is considered to hinder supply chain collaboration. Many scholars in industrial marketing and purchasing group (IMP) have examined the characteristics of asymmetry in customer-supplier relationships, focusing on the link between asymmetry in size and relational factor including power, commitment or dependence (Gundlach et al. , 1995; Söllner, 1998). In addition, several characteristics have been developed to capture the complexity of asymmetry in business-to-business relationships: particularity, mutuality and interpersonal inconsistency (Johnsen and Ford, 2008), power dependence (Håkansson, 1987), intensity (Ford and Rosson, 1982) and conflict and co-operation (Håkansson and Henders, 1992).
As collaborative supply chain management practices have diffused throughout industries, researchers have examined enablers and outcomes of supply chain collaboration by considering an imbalance of interdependence between business partners (Carniels and Gelderman, 2007; Benton and Maloni, 2005). However, the...