The Impact of Relationship Commitment on Supply Chain Integration and Company Performance

Supply chain integration (SCI) has received increasing attention from academic researchers and practitioners in recent years. However, our knowledge of what influences SCI, and how SCI influences company performance, is still very limited. This research is an effort to remedy that deficiency by empirically examining two types of relationship commitment (RC), and their impacts on SCI and performance from both supplier and customer sides, based on the data collected from 617 manufacturing companies in China. The results reveal that normative RC has a significant impact on integration and performance, while instrumental RC has no significant impact on either integration or performance. It is also found that integration improves operational performance, which in turn leads to financial performance. However, integration cannot enhance financial performance directly.