Paper info

BOUNDARY BEHAVIOR, INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING AND PURCHASING PERFORMANCE

Anni Rajala, Jukka Vesalainen and Anne Holma

The paper was published at the 32nd IMP-conference in Poznan, Poland in 2016.

The study investigates the relationships between boundary behavior, interfirm learning practices and purchasing performance. We introduce boundary behavior as one important dimension of purchasers’ set of capabilities for effective inter-organizational interaction and study if it has a role in the mechanisms generating purchasing performance. We particularly test the indirect effect of boundary behavior to purchasing performance mediated by inter-organizational learning practices. The results show that relational boundary behavior and hierarchical boundary behavior are positively associated with inter-organizational learning behavior, and indirectly influence on purchasing performance. Market-oriented boundary behavior, again, was not found to have any direct or indirect effect on purchasing performance.