Purpose of this paper: Although supply chain collaboration has received considerable research attention in the last few years, relatively few companies have achieved genuine collaboration with their supply chain partners to obtain the desired performance outcomes due to various influencing factors (Maskey et al., 2020; Tran et al., 2023). Among the explored antecedents of this practice, organisational culture has emerged as a controversial factor, with notable inconsistency persisting in previous studies regarding the relationship between organisational culture and supply chain collaboration (Porter, 2019; Taha et al., 2022). Furthermore, prior research has primarily focused on the direct relationship between organisational culture and firm performance (Pinho et al., 2014), overlooking the potential mediating role of supply chain collaboration in enhancing competitive advantage. This paper aims to address these gaps by investigating the mediating role of supply chain collaboration on the relationship between organisational culture and competitive advantage in the context of garment firms in Vietnam.

Design/methodology/approach: Underpinned by the Relational View (RV) and Organisational Culture (OC) theories, a conceptual framework on the interrelationships between organisational culture, competitive advantage and supply chain collaboration was proposed and hypotheses were developed. A survey questionnaire was developed and disseminated to potential participants through the Qualtrics platform after the pre-test and pilot test. The research population was garment manufacturers, as they are the main players in the garment supply chain in Vietnam. The unit of analysis of this study was the organisation. Rigorous data examination using SPSS was performed, and this procedure resulted in 192 valid responses retained for further analyses. Factor analysis was performed to assess the internal consistency of the attribute combination in SPSS. Subsequently, the Confirmatory Factor Analysis was employed to evaluate the convergent and discriminant validity of the constructs. The mediation effect of the constructs was assessed using the bootstrapping method (Zhao et al., 2010) to examine the significant indirect effect among 192 cases and 5,000 samples. The first step was to investigate the significance of indirect relationships, that is, the relationships between the independent variable and mediator, and between the mediator and dependent variables. Then, the types of mediation were classified by examining the significance of direct effects on the relationship between independent and dependent variables without the mediator.

Findings: The results demonstrate that organisational culture had a significant direct effect on cost competitive advantage. Also, supply chain collaboration was shown to fully mediate the relationship between organisational culture and differentiation competitive advantage. However, the mediating role of supply chain collaboration on the relationship between organisational culture and cost competitive advantage was not statistically significant. Similarly, the mediating role of cost competitive advantage on the relationship between supply chain collaboration and differentiation competitive advantage was not statistically significant.

Value: This study contributes to enhancing the existing body of knowledge in several ways. First, while most previous studies investigated the importance of organisational culture in relation to operational performance, this research also found that organisational culture positively impacts competitive advantage. Besides, this study is perhaps one of the first empirical attempts to examine the mediating role of supply chain collaboration on the relationship between organisational culture and competitive advantage in the garment industry in Vietnam. In fact, far less attention was given to the mediating effect of supply chain collaboration on the operational culture – competitive advantage relationship in the extant literature. This research hence contributes to expanding the existing knowledge on the role of supply chain collaboration by providing an all-rounded understanding of this concept in both the literature and management practice. Moreover, this study extends the application of the RV and OC theories in explaining these relationships in a new research context.

Research limitations/implications: The data analysed in this study was collected from garment manufacturers - the focal firms in garment supply chain. Therefore, obtaining data from dyadic relationships, namely, their suppliers and customers, could offer more comprehensive insights into how organisational culture effect collaboration and competitive advantage. Additionally, this research investigates the topic only within the context of Vietnam’s garment industry. Future research could enhance the finding’s reliability and validity by investigating this topic in other settings such as different industries and countries.

Practical implications: This study found that supply chain collaboration fully mediates the relationship between organisational culture and differentiation competitive advantage. This finding implies that senior management should establish and implement measures to promote development and group culture practices so that their firm’s differentiation competitive advantage can be enhanced. The full potential of these practices would be further realised by strengthening various supply chain collaboration activities, such as information sharing within the firm and across supply chain organisations through technological platforms.