Our results indicate that service quality and client’s economic benefits have different sets of determinants. Service quality is determined by three provider's capabilities and relational governance. Client’s economic benefits are determined by contractual and relational governance, client's provider management capability, and provider’s service quality. Our findings also provides evidence that service quality fully mediates the relationships among three provider's capabilities and outsourcing performance.
capability
capabilities
Research on information technology outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing
(BPO) has consistently found that client firm capabilities, provider firm capabilities, and governance mechanisms (contractual and relational) are key determinants of outsourcing performance. These key determinants work together to affect outsourcing performance, however, the information systems (IS) literature has investigated them in a separate manner. This study contributes to the body of IS knowledge by examining capabilities and governance mechanisms influence on outsourcing performance independently and jointly.
This study contributes to information systems (IS) literature in the following four aspects.
First, this study expands understanding of client capabilities, provider capabilities, and governance
mechanisms in ITO and BPO (Lacity et al. 2010; Lacity et al. 2011a). Lacity et al. (2010) and
Lacity et al. (2011a) conduct literature reviews in ITO and BPO respectively. They find that even
though prior literature has examined a variety of client capabilities and provider capabilities, only
few of them have been repeatedly tested in the empirical studies. Second, this study develops a
comprehensive research model to investigate four key determinants of outsourcing performance.
Very limited work has examined them together.