The attitudes of purchasing managers working at the leading manufacturing enterprises in Turkey towards supply chain collaboration: A proposed model based on inter-organizational trust, information sharing and commitment

Collaborative supply chains have been receiving attention of the academic researchers, especially, for the last decade. The challenging conditions of the prevailing global competition has raised the necessity of designing collaborative supply chains in order to be able to sense and respond to the changes in the task and general environment. This dissertation focuses on the relationships among the members of supply chains, with special emphasis on the role of inter-organizational concepts, such as trust, information sharing and commitment. This study is an attempt to depict a path towards the creation of collaborative supply chains through explaining the proposed causal relationships between these variables based on the attitudes of the managers working at the leading industrial enterprises of Turkey. A model is developed and related hypotheses are constructed based on the relevant academic literature and then tested through measuring attitudes of purchasing and supply chain executives of the leading manufacturing enterprises in Turkey announced annually by Istanbul Chamber of Industry. The survey that has been run within this study employs an interval scale questionnaire applied, both, on-line and face-to-face on the respondents. The research findings provide useful implications to be considered on the way to establish a collaborative supply chain. The study is a first attempt to reveal the attitudes of business professional towards the nature interorganizational in the context of the proposed model in the dissertation.