Abstract:

Market orientations facilitate firm performance, but how to achieve it becomes a dilemma for firms and research scholars. Particularly with the increasing market competition and development of logistics outsourcing, more and more companies achieve market-oriented goals with partnerships outside. Based on the resource-based theory and synergy theory, this paper builds and tests the model of operational synergistic capability and its mediating effect on the relationship between market orientation and business performance through in-depth interviews, focus group and questionnaire survey in Logistics Outsourcing background. The empirical results show that operational synergistic capability is consisted of three dimensions: external coordination between firms and 3PLs, internal coordination within the firm departments, and operational flexibility that fully mediate the relationship between market orientation and business performance. In other words, the relationship between market orientations and performance is indirect, and operational synergistic capability is the key variable that market orientation is converted to performance, which open the black box of .the relationship between market orientations and performance. In order to give full play to market-oriented strategy for performance improvement, companies need to strengthen the training of operational synergistic capability.

Key words: logistics outsourcing, market orientation, operational synergistic capability, performance, mediating effect