The Effects of IT Leveraging Competence on Firm Performance in Cross-Firm Relationships: Focusing on Social Capital and Collaboration

Cross-firm collaboration has emerged as one of the primary management issues in the network-driven economy. Previous studies have emphasized cross-firm collaboration as a key factor in the successful attainment of corporate success in buyer-supplier relationships. However, these studies have not focused on the efficacy of IT leveraging competence and social capital with regard to collaboration. It is believed that social capital as well as IT leveraging competence has been historically accumulated as the result of long-term firm experience. In this study, we suggest that IT leveraging competence and social capital are facilitating factors of cross-firm collaboration (information sharing and cooperation), and empirically assess their impacts on collaboration and firm performance. The results of our empirical tests demonstrate that IT leveraging competence directly affects information sharing and social capital, and that social capital positively influences cross-firm collaboration. Firm performance also was determined to be affected by cross-firm collaboration. These findings showed that IT leveraging competence and social capital contributed significantly to cross-firm collaboration, and they were resources of competitive power, constituting crucial intangible assets of each firm.