An Influence of Supplier Partnership on Competitiveness of SMEs: Moderating Roles of Entrepreneurial Orientation and Dynamic Capability.

SMEs are structured as a core element to foster and accelerate Thai economic growth, employment, enterprise and business establishments(Upalanala, 2007). However, more than half of new business disappear in the first year due to the failure to stand up to competition because they lack of vital resources (Chanchart, 2011), and the rise in degree of competition in the market forces SMEs to compete simultaneously in many dimensions. With this, they should be learning about how to build stronger relationships with suppliers, which is to build partnership with supplier in order to acquire knowledge-based resources gained from partnership development within this study, we apply resource-based view into the study as SMEs-supplier partnership is treated as a network resource for enhancing competitive advantage of the SMEs. With regard to this, we tend to study whether there is a positive relationship between environment uncertainty and SME-supplier partnership, and the result of this study confirms its positive significance. Moreover, we apply social capital theory to explain further about the value creation gained by SMEs from developing partnership such as knowledge and information that is shared by supplier and SMEs in term of an improvement in SME’s competitive advantage and with this study’s result also confirm its significantly positive relationship. Additionally, we include an effect of entrepreneurial orientation in term of firm-risk taking and internal locus of control aspects, together with an effect of dynamic capability in term of organizational responsiveness capacity and absorptive capacity. Accordingly, the result of this study SMEs entrepreneur seem to possess risk taking characteristics, and that negatively moderate the partnership development while the same result provided with internal locus of control that its characteristic negatively moderate SME’s competitive advantage improvement. Furthermore, in term of dynamic capability, it is founded that organizational responsiveness capacity does not moderate SMEs to develop partnership with supplier perceiving environmental uncertainty, while absorptive capacity help positively moderate SMEs to achieve an improvement in competitive advantage.