برون سپاری و عملکرد شرکت: یک متاآنالیز Outsourcing and firm performance: a meta-analysis

1. Introduction Most global firms are outsourcing various functions of their firms to save time, cost, intellectual resources and thus utilize their core competencies for their primary competitive strategies. Outsourcing secondary activities have primarily enabled companies into rechanneling their energies toward focusing on the primary value chain activities and strengthening their core strategies ( Jiang et al., 2006). Over the years, outsourcing has gained increasing momentum as no firm operates as a single entity anymore. Various functions like manufacturing, IT, accounting, human resources, research and development (R&D) are outsourced locally and internationally by firms. The concept of re-shoring has also begun gaining momentum in the recent times as some scholars and practitioners argue that risks of outsourcing outweigh its benefits. Due to this, a lot of manufacturing jobs are being brought back to the USA to increase local employment. Most US firms are bringing back their globally outsourced functions locally to save cost. Given this background, we felt it was imperative to investigate the relationships between the following main constructs: “outsourcing” and “performance of firms.” According to Kroes and Ghosh (2010, p. 124), outsourcing is defined as “the allocation of business activities from a source internal to an organization to a source outside of the organization.” Advancement in technology, social media and cloud computing has made outsourcing a very plausible option for most industries as buyers, suppliers and vendors in different parts of the world can collaborate and communicate in a matter of seconds. Some studies have proposed the positive relation between outsourcing and performance while some have counter-argued this point of view. Barthelemy and Adsit (2003) argued that most of these claims about the positive association between outsourcing and firm performance during the nascent stage of outsourcing which is also referred to as the “honeymoon phase” may not be an accurate representation of the relationship. There is a dearth of longitudinal studies to examine whether outsourcing has positively impacted firm performance measures over a span of several years. Gilley et al. (2000) found no association between outsourcing and firm performance, which was moderated by strategy, and environmental dynamism. Jiang et al. (2006) found that outsourcing improved the firm’s operational efficiency. Kotabe and Mol (2009) used secondary data from manufacturing firms in the Netherlands to assess the relationship between outsourcing and performance. They looked at data encompassing two years (1995 and 1998) and observed that market uncertainty moderated the negative relationship between a firm’s outsourcing and its performance measures. Stanko et al. (2007) found that the association between higher profit and outsourcing of R&D differed between high-tech and low-tech industries. We observe that there is a lack of consensus in the extant literature about the effects of outsourcing on firm performance. There are mixed results across various studies that test the empirical linkage between outsourcing and performance.