The effect of environmental uncertainty on supply chain integration in Chinese manufacturing industry

Supply chain integration nowadays is considered as an important approach to building and sustaining advantages. Many previous empirical researches focus on the effect of supply chain integration on the firms´ performance, yet, the antecedence of supply chain integration is still largely unknown. This paper investigates the relationship between environmental uncertainty (including demand uncertainty, supply uncertainty and technology uncertainty) and supply chain integration (including customer integration, supplier integration and internal integration) with 139 samples from Chinese manufacturing industry. The results reveal both supply uncertainty and technology uncertainty significantly influence supply chain integration; the effect of supply uncertainty is negative, while that of technology uncertainty is positive. However, demand uncertainty just has a significant effect on internal integration. The relationship between demand uncertainty and external integration (including customer integration and supplier integration) is mediated by the internal integration.