An Empirical Study on the Influence of Environmental Uncertainty on the Information Sharing of Firms- a Supply Chain Perspective

Abstract

This research paper is one of the first attempts to study the supply chain practices of small manufacturing.firms. The objective is to find out the impact of environmental uncertainty on the information sharing practices of the firms. The sample frame is small scale manufacturers {firms with less than 100 employees) listed with CODISSIA. A simple random sample of 75 firms is selected from the source list of 792 firms. These firms were administered a structured questionnaire containing pre validated scales to measure the environmental uncertainty and supply chain integration of.firms. After the data was collected, the scales were purified using CITC values and Cronbach's alpha. The resultant purified scales were then tested for convergent validity using PLS path modeling software (Visual PLS). Once the constructs were both reliable and valid, the impact of environmental uncertainty on information sharing was tested using bootstrapping method. The environmental uncertainty was found to have a significant positive impact on the information sharing practices of the firms.