Impact of structural embeddedness on the performance of tourism supply chain integration: a social network perspective

Improving information integration is a challenge faced by many organizations. This study constitutes a mixed application if network analysis to measure the integrating performance on suppliers and customers in supply chain, called tourism supply chain integration (TSCI). The quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) method was applied to test the causal relationships among interconnectedness, structural equivalence, structural autonomy and TSCI. Results show that interconnectedness and structural equivalence were positively related to supplier integration. Whilst structural autonomy was positively related to both supplier and customer integration, indicating that highly structurally embedded tour organizations can achieve relatively better efficiency on supplier integration. It is supposed to provide directions for engineering managers to enhance the cooperation with suppliers and customers through improving integrating performance of information.