Séminaire de recherche par Hugues Poissonnier

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Developing fruitful and sustainable collaboration with suppliers : an approach based on Herzberg’s two factors theory

This paper aims to identify the most relevant elements of best practice for successful collaboration between buyers and suppliers over the long term. Many papers have addressed best practices aiming to create value through innovation, co-innovation, and open innovation. Despite the abundance of this useful literature, practitioners are still missing more concrete ideas or help allowing them to take more relevant decisions and ensure more productive and sustainable collaboration with suppliers. Starting from all the answers brought to the “why” question, as well as to the “how”, we propose, in this paper, to focus on the element level enabling successful best collaborative practice in value-creating collaborations. To do so, we develop an approach based on Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory distinguishing motivation and hygiene factors (Herzberg, 1968). We also use grounded theory and relying on a qualitative exploratory methodology, to identify five most relevant motivation factors – including sharing investments, risks, industrial property, and economic results – and hygiene factors – consisting of respecting the partners, engagements, and payment period – depending on the macro context in which the collaboration is built: tactical collaboration for innovation, long term strategic collaboration, or collaboration in times of crisis.

About Hugues Poissonnier

Hugues Poissonnier is Associate Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management where he is responsible for courses in strategy, control and purchasing. He also teaches in several business schools, engineer schools and Universities in Europe. He focuses his research activities on collaboration in inter-organizational contexts, subject on which he has written several research articles and thirty books. He is also member of the research chair “Economic Peace” and director of IRIMA, which is a research institute focusing its activities on purchasing and collaboration between companies. He has developed many training sessions for companies dedicated to buyers, sellers or human resources teams.