The influence of socialisation practices on organisational culture and supplier operational performance

This paper investigates the extent to which informal and formal socialisation mechanisms affect supplier organisational culture and if this leads to improvements in supplier performance.Using a quantitative sample of 279 UK companies from across a variety of industry sectors, a buyer company completed a survey on their perceptions of a typical high-performing supplier. The effect of informal and formal socialisation mechanisms on organisational culture and supplier operational performance outcomes was analysed. Our findings show that informal and formal socialisation methods have a direct and significant influence on the cultural dimensions of market, employee, open and loose. The cultural dimensions of normative and employee, where found to have a significant impact on operational supply chain performance. This is one of the first studies to break down culture into a number of sub-dimensions within the context of buyer/supplier relationships.