24043: Coopetition in Supplier-Supplier Relationships: Scale Development and Measurement Validation (session 25588)

Coopetition, the simultaneous collaboration and competition between firms, is critical to supplier-supplier relationships. However, our understanding of how coopetition affects firms and their supply chains is limited, partly due to the varied ways in which previous studies operationalized coopetition. In this paper, we propose four necessary conditions for measuring coopetition and use them to evaluate existing operationalizations, demonstrating that they provide an incomplete picture of the construct observed in industrial practice. Following a two stage approach, we then develop and test corresponding measurement scales to better capture the broad definition of coopetition. The first stage involves a literature review, structured interviews with 15 practitioners, and a systematic sorting process with 129 business students. In the second stage, we replicate a study on supplier-supplier coopetition using data from 205 key respondents to test the psychometric properties of our scales. Our results demonstrate that our scales have sufficient psychometric properties to be used by researchers to build, test, or refine supply chain theory. Our scales contribute to the growing stream of supply chain measurement and should help to offer more reliable knowledge for academics and managers in the long run.

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