Leadership for effective supply chain partnership

Abstract

Leadership plays a very important role in the performance of a company. It lays down the infrastructure, policies and guidelines for the different functions of the company to perform its best. Since companies are increasingly aware of the importance of upstream and downstream organizations to their performance, companies' leaders would also like to influence companies' relationships and operations with the supply chain partners. They would like their supply chain managers to get the best contributions from the supply chain partners. This paper aims to study the role of leadership in the supply chain partnership. It examines how leadership's disposition to whether a company should develop a long-term relationship and adopt a co-operative culture with their supply chain partners would affect the interactions and the nature of goal orientations between the company and its supply chain partners. In addition, the study will analyse whether the nature of interactions and goal orientation will affect suppliers' contributions. The results of the study support that leadership has an important role to play in making the supply chain partnership effective. It affects the interactions and goal orientation between the supply chain managers and the supply partners and also the resulting outcome.