A Development of Supply Chain Intergration Construct: Using the Q-sort Technique.
Sakun Boon-itt
>> Download ebook <<
Supply chain integration is an important topic for researchers and practitioners. However, the major concerns constraining the full and complete use of this concept in supply chain management research has been that the construct takes on its own meaning depending on individual subjectivity and different points of view. There is a need for researchers to operationalize and measure what it means by supply chain integration. The basic research question is whether a meaningful measure of supply chain integration can be developed. Exploratory study where subjective judgments of an indescribable object are involved could be conducted using the Q-sort technique because it captures an entity by finding stimuli which can be clustered to form a description of the construct. This paper describes the use of the Q-sort technique in the scale development process and applies it to the context of evaluating supply chain integration. The results indicate that the Q-sort technique is a useful methodological approach in eliminating the validity and reliability problems particularly in the early scale development stages for defining the construct of supply chain integration.
