Date: April 15, 2014

Time: 10:00 am-11:00 am

Venue: Room 1102, Administration Building, Zijingang Campus

Speaker: Manus Rungtusanatham（Production and Operations Management Journal (a UTD journal) Global Operations Strategy department editor）

Topic: Supplier Performance and Strategic Relationship Dissolution: When Does Superior Historical Supplier Performance Become Detrimental?

Abstract: Conventional wisdom suggests that superior historical supplier performance and the likelihood that the strategic relationship between a manufacturer and its critical-component supplier is dissolved are inversely related. Our paper puts this conventional wisdom contributes insights into when, how, and why this conventional wisdom breaks down. Data for our empirical test were collected from 256 sourcing professionals participating in a scenario-based role-playing experiment.Manipulation, confounding effects, and the Hawthorne effect checks provided evidence as to the integrity of the experimental design.Fitting a general linear mixed-effects model to the data with appropriate robustness checks found that a critical-component supplier with superior historical performance is more likely to be recommended for termination than one with subpar historical performance when a recent devastating supplier error is committed.This superior supplier performance penalty effect appears to be robust across conditions of prior supplier involvement in joint product development activities and availability of attractive substitutes in the supply market.Our findings have theoretical and pragmatic implications for how a critical-component supplier should manage its ongoing strategic relationship with its industrial customer.