Cultural competitiveness in global sourcing

This study integrates thought on entrepreneurship, innovation, and organizational learning and examines a framework of sustainable competitive advantage as it pertains to global sourcing. The study adopts a chain of customer perspective and focuses on entrepreneurship, innovativeness, and learning in an organization's long-linked chain of interrelationships within the global sourcing process. Using sourcing directors of 200 multinational corporations, entrepreneurship, innovativeness, and learning were found to function as first-order indicators of the second-order construct of sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). SCA, in turn, has a positive effect on cycle time of the global sourcing process and the organization's overall business performance. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.