Although recent research on business-to-business professional service firms (PSFs) emphasizes the role and consequences of collaboration with business partners, we know little regarding the conditions under which bright-side benefits of PSF interfirm collaboration turn into dark-side drawbacks. Our study shows that customer and supplier collaborations have both bright and dark sides, and their benefits with respect to helping a PSF to drive service performance are contingent on the levels of the environmental competition and turbulence. In particular, we show that increasing levels of competitive intensity and environmental turbulence encountered by a PSF can diminish the capacity of customer and supplier collaborations to drive service performance. When the level of competitive intensity increases, the benefits of customer collaboration become more positive; however, the dark-side of supplier collaboration becomes more pronounced, which negatively influences service performance. When the level of environmental turbulence increases, the dark-side of customer and supplier collaborations becomes more critical and the benefits derived from interfirm collaboration to promote service performance can be lost.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	Professional service firms; Customer collaboration; Supplier collaboration; Service performance; Competitive intensity; Environmental turbulence; Partial least squares
Research Division:	Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services
Research Group:	Marketing
Research Field:	Marketing management (incl. strategy and customer relations)
Objective Division:	Economic Framework
Objective Group:	Management and productivity
Objective Field:	Marketing
UTAS Author:	O'Cass, A (Professor Aron O'Cass)
UTAS Author:	Siahtiri, V (Ms Vida Siahtiri)
ID Code:	107285
Year Published:	2016
Web of Science® Times Cited:	58
Deposited By:	TSBE
Deposited On:	2016-03-09
Last Modified:	2018-03-14
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