This section would conclude the main finding, management enlightenment, theoretical and practical contributions of the study and limitation of this research. This research developed and tested a model of collaboration and provides profound analysis of the inter-organizational collaboration and its influencing factors from trust, organizational capacities and e-business diffusion. This research pointed out that trust facilitates collaboration and results in a high business performance, e-business diffusion has no significant effect on the output of collaboration and it should be accompanied with a high level of organizational capacities. Enhanced collaboration network or e-collaboration network is a valuable perspective for electrical industry and also for other globalized industries.
TopMain Findings Of The Research
The research was conducted to answer the main research question regarding the relationship between inter-organizational collaboration and performance of the organisations. Determining the effect of collaboration on business performance answered the research question of how and to what extent inter-organizational collaboration affects business performance. The derived three sub-questions from the main research questions assisted the analysis and investigation.
The first question aimed to explore the effect of trust. The research indicated that Wenzhou electrical organizations are moving towards achieving positive business performance via mutual-trusted collaboration. This research indicates that trust is an initiating factor for collaboration advancement, but not all organizations seem to regard it as significant for business performance in the Wenzhou electrical industry in China. This situation is not surprising. Only the organizations facilitate trust to support collaboration, and trust is shown to be a statistically significant influence in business performance improvement in this industry context.
The second question concerned the link of organizational capacities and the implementation of collaboration performances. The research clearly suggests organizational capacities are accepted as part of collaboration practice. In moving to global markets, collaboration eventually contributes to a major improvement in business performance based on organizational capacities advancement.
The third question aimed to understand and identify the effect resulting from e-business on collaboration practices and business performance. Rather than simple technological innovation, most of the practices are centred in the ‘soft’ perspective — diffusion of these e-business technologies. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence from this research implied that these diffusion attributes do not translated properly into the inter-organizational collaboration. Their correlation does not prove to be statistically important. The majority of the organizations tend to disregard e-business as a means of in achieving successful collaboration performance. This result may be rationalized by the inability of these organizations to nurture an e-business diffusion culture with their trading partners. On the other side, this research found that proactive business performance improvement activities are consistent with the emphasis on e-business innovation, and organizational capacities are key motivators for an advancement of collaboration. A combination of the sound organizational capacities and constructive e-business diffusion is the best viable approach to contribute to a major improvement in business performance.