구매기업과의 신제품 공동개발 과정에서 발생하는 프로젝트 모호성에 대한 실증적 연구: 공급업체의 관점에서

Buying firms often involve suppliers in their new product development projects to reduce development cost and lead time and improve manufacturability of the new product. To be successful, a supplier organization needs to understand clearly its roles and responsibilities expected by the buyer organization. Yet the supplier often complains about insufficient and unclear data, and suffers from ambiguous interpretations that contradict buyer’s expectation. We conceptualized project ambiguity as perceived uncertainty arising from insufficient information,unclear definitions, conflicting interpretations, and misunderstandings of facts in carrying out relevant tasks. Although both organizations may face project ambiguity, this study focused on the supplier side. Hence, we explore the antecedents to supplier-perceived project ambiguity,and its effect upon the supplier’s project performance and business performance. Underpinned in the knowledge based view of the firm, we suggested the following four antecedents: product innovativeness, buyer’s protectiveness of core knowledge, supplier absorptive capacity, and degree of buyer-supplier routine communication. A total of 103 joint new product development projects were sampled from the automotive, electronics, and defense industries in Korea to empirically test the hypotheses. Empirical analyses revealed that product innovativeness and buyer’s protectiveness of core knowledge significantly increased ambiguity perceived by the supplier, and in turn, that the greater ambiguity negatively affected the project performance and supplier’s business performance measures.