This dissertation investigates supply chain collaboration. Supply chain collaboration is defined as a long-term relationship where participants generally cooperate, share information, and work together to plan and even modify their business practices to improve joint performance (Whipple et al., 2010). Analyzing supply chain collaboration provides researchers further understanding of the concept as we seek to move the body of knowledge related to supply chain collaboration forward. Investigating supply chain collaboration delivers practical value to firm managers by seeking methods to increase supply chain collaboration success, identifying what factors lead to, or are generated from, successful collaboration, and determining firm performance benefits of supply chain collaboration.

Utilizing the three-paper model, this dissertation's main chapters follow journal article formatting to separate distinct, but related, analyses and investigations of supply chain collaboration. Chapter 2 will synthesize existing supply chain collaboration literature and provide an assessment of the gaps in the understanding of the concept. The review will be augmented with thoughts from practitioners discussing why or what causes collaboration to occur, what practitioners look for when collaborating with other firms, and what performance implications result when successful collaboration occurs. Chapter 3 will utilize survey data to investigate uncertainty and its impact on supply chain collaboration, and eventually, firm performance. The relationship between uncertainty and supply chain collaboration is a topic yet to be fully explored and this manuscript will add to the literature by looking at uncertainty in three forms: behavioral, environmental, and technological. These different forms of uncertainty and their relationship with supply chain collaboration will be investigated individually. Additionally, supply chain collaboration's link with firm financial and operational performance will be analyzed. Finally, the relationship between different forms of uncertainty and supply chain collaboration will be moderated by varying factors in order to determine interaction effects. This analysis step seeks to provide managers input on external forces and internally generated mechanisms which may impact uncertainty's relationship with supply chain collaboration. Chapter 5 discusses a unique mediating factor between supply chain collaboration and firm performance termed collaborative benefits. Identification of these benefits is important as we seek to determine outcomes from collaboration over and above direct performance effects. A series of moderators are also investigated with their impact on the relationship between supply chain collaboration and collaborative benefits analyzed. Establishing boundary conditions around significant, direct effects provide researchers and practitioners more information when studying and executing business functions.