بازنگری رابطه بین مدیریت موجودی و عملکرد شرکت: چشم انداز چرخه زندگی سازمانی Reexamining the relationship between inventory management and firm performance: An organizational life cycle perspective

1. Introduction Notwithstanding academicians and practitioners believe that inventory is a costly activity, they disagree on its necessity (Elsayed, in press). One research area that has grown considerably, in the operations management literature, and provided mixed findings is inventory-performance relationship. Specifically, while the positive effect of inventory reduction on organization performance has been reported in various studies that are based on either survey (Claycomb, Germain, & Dröge, 1999; Fullerton & McWatters, 2001; Fullerton, McWatters, & Fawson, 2003) or archival data (Boute, Lambrecht, Lambrechts, & Sterckx, 2006; Capkun, Hameri, & Weiss, 2009; Chen, Frank, & Wu, 2005; Elsayed, 2015a; Huson & Nanda, 1995; Koumanakos, 2008; Lieberman & Demeester, 1999; Shah & Shin, 2007; Swamidass, 2007; Voulgaris, Doumpos, & Zopounidis, 2000), other studies (e.g., Balakrishnan, Linsmeier, & Venkatachalam, 1996; Cannon, 2008; Demeter, 2003; Tunc & Gupta, 1993; Vastag & Clay Whybark, 2005) found no clear evidence for this relationship. Critical examination of prior work indicates that the influence of organizational life cycle issues on the relationship between inventory and organization performance has not been examined. In fact, considering the effect of organizational life cycle on the relationship between inventory and performance recognizes that managing inventory not only cannot be isolated from other organizational settings, but also is subject to the power and interests of stakeholders (De Vries, 2011). This is a realistic theme as different studies demonstrated that inventory decisionmaking is a dynamic process that entails different stakeholders with conflicting interests (De Vries, 2009). Thus, taking into account the effect of life cycle stage on inventory-performance relationship explains how internal and external variables may collaborate or interact with inventory decisions to affect organization performance. Such interaction may signify that the inventory-performance relationship is a non-monotonic one. For instance, to hypothesis that any reduction in inventory can only be attained by increasing investment in another type of resource is not always the case. Organizations with higher bargaining power, for example, often enforce their suppliers to take some actions to reduce inventory (Poirier, 1999). Moreover, benefits of increasing investment in information technology to reduce inventory in many cases are found to accrue to the supplier and not the buyer (Kim, 2012). In addition, to assume that increasing inventory is always evidence for inefficiency is a shortsighted view as it overlooks the relationship between competition and inventory holding. For instance, as Rotemberg and Saloner (1989) argued, “firms hold greater inventories as a strategic threat to maintain collusive pricing arrangements. Higher inventories allow firms punish price deviations of cheaters more strongly by flooding the market with product, which has similarly been reduced in price” (Blazenko & Vandezande, 2003, p. 257).