Impact Of Upstream Supply Chain Coordination On The Performance Of Zimbabwean Agro-processing Organizations

The study assessed the impact of upstream supply chain coordination on the performance Zimbabwean agro processing organisations and developed a framework that can bridge existing practical and theoretical knowledge gaps in the coordination of supply chains in the country. Seventeen hypotheses were proposed and tested. The main objective of the study was to assess the impact of upstream supply chain coordination on the performance of the agro processing organisations and developing a supply chain framework model that could be used by Zimbabwean agro-processing companies to gain competitive advantage and improve organisational performance. The study proposed a Conceptual Framework for Upstream Supply Chain Coordination as a way to bridge existing practical and theoretical knowledge gaps in supply chain coordination. The Buyer-Seller Framework for Supply Chain Coordination was proposed to improve the relationship and interactions among Zimbabwean agro processing organisations. Other objectives of the study were; describing the nature of the agro processing organisations inZimbabwe, identification of the antecedents of supply chain coordination among Zimbabwean companies, evaluating the consequences of supply chain coordination among the Zimbabwean agro processing companies. The convergent parallel mixed methods research design was adopted as the guiding model for the data collection, analysis and interpretation process in this study. The study utilised quantitative and qualitative data collection procedures such as the questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21.0 and STATA14 quantitative software packages were used to analyse quantitative data while NVivo 11 and UCINET qualitative software packages were used for analysis of qualitative data respectively. The findings show that the sector has adopted supply chain coordination as a businees strategy and that the Zimbabwean agro processing organisations’ supply chains use contractual agreements, vertically integrated as well as transactional in nature. Coordination mechanisms used in the sector include contracts and price. The study identified antecedents of supply chain coordination as trust, communication, commitment, and information sharing, technology, and collaboration and transaction specific investments. The research findings through hypothesis testing show that trust and communication, have a significant impact on supply chain coordination, while transaction specific investments have no impact. The findings also show that trust, coordination and transaction specific investments have an impact on organisational performance in support of the transaction cost theory applicability to Zimbabwean agro processing organisations. On the other hand, the findings show that communication has no impact on the performance of the organisations. The findings also show that the information sharing has an impact on supply chain coordination but collaboration has no impact on coordination. The variables coordination, information sharing and collaboration have a significant impact on organisational performance showing that the resource-based theory is  applicable in the sector. The findings also show thattechnology has a significant impact on supply chain coordination, but supplier relationship characteristics have no impact.