Organisational and inter-organisational competencies for supply chain integration

The purpose of the paper is to integrate human resource management with supply chain management by examining the role of inter-organisational competencies (information sharing) as a mediator between the organisational competencies (cross-functional information sharing, participative culture and learning orientation) and supply chain integration (SCI). To test the hypotheses of interest, data were collected on 80 manufacturing firms from India through a structured questionnaire and analysed using partial least squares (PLS) method. The findings revealed that participative culture and learning orientation were positively related to SCI and were fully and partially mediated by information sharing (IS) respectively. The study provides evidence for linking competencies with SCI in the literature that are otherwise scarce in the form of empirical studies in the context of supply chain. It also succeeds in examining the role of inter-organisational competency as a mediator, thus providing in-depth insights into such competencies. This study is probably one of the first in studying competencies required for SCI in the Indian context.