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1. Introduction
Supply chain collaboration - "the ability to work across organizational boundaries to build and manage unique value-added processes" (Fawcett et al. , 2008a, p. 93) - has been touted as a source of differential firm performance (Frohlich and Westbrook, 2001; Flynn et al. , 2010; Swink and Schoenherr, 2015). When the benefits of working collaboratively outweigh its costs (Terjesen et al. , 2012), firms may seek to combine complementary capabilities to create value that they could not achieve independently (Barratt, 2004; Daugherty et al. , 2006; Allred et al. , 2011). The view that firms collaborate to obtain supernormal "relational rents" is referred to as the Relational View (Dyer and Singh, 1998). Despite the widely hyped benefits obtained by relational exemplars like Honda and Toyota, few firms have demonstrated a consistent ability to collaborate in a way that leads to distinctive advantage (Daugherty et al. , 2006; Jacobides, 2006; Nyaga et al. , 2010).
Further, the cost of collaboration failures asserts a need to investigate why effective supply chain collaboration is so rare. Hendricks and Singhal, for instance, conducted a series of event studies to quantify the operational and stock price effects of supply chain glitches. Firms that experience and announce disruptions report on average 6.92 per cent lower sales growth, 10.66 per cent higher growth in cost and 13.88 per cent higher growth in inventories (Hendricks and Singhal, 2005). Hendricks and Singhal (2008, p. 787) conclude:
The fact that disruptions caused by external sources (supplier and customers) experienced a higher penalty suggests that these problems can be more expensive and time consuming for the firm to fix. This may be due to the firm's limited power to change their external partners' operations to solve the problems. This further underscores the need to form close and collaborative relationships with the various links in the supply chain. A firm must make sure that its supply chain partners see the value of working together.
Assessing why firms fail to execute collaboration strategies is therefore timely. Indeed, it has been almost 20 years since Dyer and Singh (1998, p. 676) said, "Given the poor track record of many alliances, researchers might examine, in detail, the factors that impede the realization of relational rents". Although diverse explanations...