The Impact of Stakeholder identification and Salience on the supplier's IT Infrastructure Integration with Customers

With the prevalence of electronic supply chain integration (e-SCI), increasingly more customers are asking their suppliers to integrate IT infrastructure for SCM and many suppliers indeed comply with their customers’ requests. However, a supplier can have multiple customers and limited resources . Therefore, the supplier typically responds to its customers’ requests for IT infrastructure integration selectively. To investigate this phenomenon, this study draws on Mitchell, Agle, and Wood’s (1997) stakeholder identification and salience framework to examine whether the customer’s stakeholder salience influences the supplier’s IT infrastructure integration for SCM. This study also examines whether the customer’s legitimacy, power, and urgency determine their salience perceived by the supplier. This study surveyed Taiwanese manufacturers. Based on one hundred and eight effective questionnaires, our findings showed that: (1) stakeholder salience is positively associated with IT infrastructure integration for SCM (i.e., data consistency and cross-functional application integration); (2) legitimacy and power have positive impacts on stakeholder salience while urgency does not. Our findings can facilitate customers to select appropriate suppliers for successful promotion of IT infrastructure integration for SCM.