Supply chain relationship quality - a review and empirical analysis

In today's complex, dynamic and global supply chain environment, relationships formed between supply chain partners has increasingly been considered an important source of achieving business success and sustainable competitive advantage of a firm. Effectively developing, operating, governing and maintaining relationships build with supply partners remains a huge challenge for any organization involved in the supply chains. This dissertation works at the intersection of previously largely disconnected streams of literature and attempts to contribute by integrating the research perspectives of relationship marketing (RM) and supply chain management (SCM) on an overlapping unit of investigation, which is considered supply chain relationship quality (SCRQ). Through a review and empirical analysis of the SCRQ issues, this dissertation involves a discovery of the connection of SCRQ and SCM, and thus the overachieving question "how are SCRQ and SCM related to each other" was answered. This dissertation includes four individual research studies. They are embedded into an overall framing. They add to the respective RM and SCM literature by (1) reviewing the scope of the RQ topics in a SC context and developing the research framework of SCRQ, (2) analyzing the overlap of literature on SCRQ and supply chain integration (SCI) and examining the linkages of dimensions and performance of SCI reflected in the SCRQ studies, (3) providing empirical insights into effective management of SCRQ issues in the Chinese business context from a multiple channel and multiple levels perspective.