Perceived Moderating Ability of Relational Interaction vs. Reciprocal Investments in Pursuing Exploitation vs. Exploration in RFID Supply Chains - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 94

concLusion Another idea would be to introduce the following

control variables in the research model: length of
relationship between trading partners, volume
of business generated with trading partner as a
percentage of total revenue, and level of com-
plexity of the product/service delivered. It would
be interesting to see if the following conditions
encourage firms to make reciprocal investments
with their respective trading partners in pursuing
exploitation and/or exploration: having a fairly
long relationship with the trading partner, dealing
with a trading partner that generates a sizable per-
centage of total sales revenue, and the delivery of
a fairly complex product or service. In this study,
of course, it was found that relational interaction
was the more effective moderator rather than recip-
rocal investments. It was surmised that, perhaps,
the firms in this sample had not experienced the
benefits of such investments possibly because the
relationship with their respective trading partner
is fairly new. However, with the introduction of
the control variables, it may be possible to see
if reciprocal investments are more frequently
made in the relationship and thus, would more
effectively moderate the relationships between the
independent and dependent variables in this study.
A firm may seriously consider making reciprocal
investments with a trading partner that accounts
for a large percentage of that firm's sales revenues.
Similarly, a firm might make such reciprocal in-
vestments when the product or service involved
in the relationship is complex enough to justify
making idiosyncratic operational and/or techno-
logical arrangements with the respective trading
partner. It would also be instructive to see if the
ability of reciprocal investments and relational
interaction to moderate the relationships between
the independent and dependent variables in RFID
supported supply chains would vary by industry.

The overall study findings support the importance
of relational interaction as a moderator variable
between the two elements of IT infrastructure
integration, data consistency and cross-functional
application integration, and the three elements of
supply chain process integration, namely, financial
flow integration, information flow integration, and
physical flow integration and one of the two depen-
dent variables, exploitation. This study's findings
should alert supply chain managers involved in
forthcoming RFID implementation initiatives to
pay close attention to relational interaction coor-
dination mechanisms to assure the attainment of
the RFID system's exploitation goals.
The study has a number of limitations. First of
all, study participants that were knowledgeable
about RFID or may be implementing RFID in the
future were asked to report their perceptions of
the importance of the variables used in the study:
IT infrastructure integration, supply chain process
integration, exploitation, exploration, reciprocal
investments, and relational interaction. A future
study should capture these perceptions from firms
that have actually implemented RFID systems.
Second, the data was gleaned from a convenience
sample of 87 firms that responded to those items in
the survey questionnaire. In the future, a random
sample is needed in order to arrive at representa-
tive implications and generalizations.

references

Aguinis, H. (2004). Regression Analysis for Cat-
egorical Moderators . New York: The Guilford
Press.

Artz, K. W. (1999). Buyer-Supplier Performance:
The Role of Asset Specificity, Reciprocal Invest-
ments and Relational Exchange. British Journal
of Management , 10 , 113-126. doi:10.1111/1467-
8551.00114