Multi-vendor outsourcing: Relational structures and organizational learning from a social relation perspective

Abstract

The increasing trend of engaging multiple vendors, coupled with the concern for "possible" loss of knowledge in outsourcing relationship, compels us to investigate organizational learning in multi-vendor outsourcing from a social relation perspective. The nature of social relation has been conceptualized in terms of how organizational relationships with social entities facilitate and/or inhibit knowledge flow and organizational learning. This research-in-progress study tries to investigate how three critical dimensions - structural, affective and cognitive - in social relations are associated with organizational learning approaches, i.e., exploitative learning or exploratory learning in the context of IT outsourcing. In particular, we examine how two different relational models - multi-vendor dominant model and single vendor dominant model - in the multi-vendor outsourcing are associated with the three dimensions of social relations by proposing six hypotheses. We intend to test them empirically via questionnaires in a field study. With the findings, we anticipate five major theoretical and practical contributions.