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This study investigates two key issues: 1) how internal integration, customer integration, supplier integration, and the interplay among them jointly influence the development of mass customization capability (MCC), and 2) how environmental conditions (i.e., demand uncertainty and competitive intensity) moderate the impacts of supply chain integration on this development. Based on the extended resource-based view (ERBV) of the firm and contingency theory, we build a conditional indirect model and test it using a dataset of 289 manufacturers from nine countries. Our results are consistent with the ERBV, showing that internal integration not only has a significant direct effect on MCC, but also plays a central and strategic role in building customer and supplier integration. However, although customer integration is found to improve MCC directly, supplier integration appears to have no significant impact. Finally, internal integration has a positive indirect effect on MCC through customer integration, and this indirect effect is amplified when demand is uncertain and competition is intense.
Lai et al. (Fri,) studied this question.