AMCIS: The Challenges of Selecting Constructs when Synonymous Construct Names and Measures are Used Throughout the Literature

The COVID-19 pandemic detrimentally impacted the worldwide economy by interrupting the global supply chains (SC) due to government-imposed lock-down restrictions. While firms in other industries experienced less disruptions when shutting down face-to-face operations, SC organizations had to quickly adapt to hybrid work environments to ensure continuity of daily operations. Though the pandemic is behind us, SC organizations continue to maintain a hybrid business model. The goal of this research is to develop a new theoretical framework to determine how digitalization supports SC agility (SCA) and SC resilience (SCR) in a hybrid work environment to ensure knowledge communities maintain knowledge contribution in a SC environment. To study this phenomenon, we will survey SC professionals to test our proposed model. After a long literature review, we located several different instruments are used to measure digitalization with some only using digital tools (DT) or digital maturity (DM), while other used combination of these items, measured digitalization as a second order construct or using entirely different constructs. We are currently focused on using Zouari and Dakhli (2018) to measure digitalization using both DT and DM; however, we feel that the model tested was only a portion of the entire framework. We also discovered that our proposed constructs are not simple measures. We are having similar issues trying to distinguish between SCA and SCR. Are they different constructs or are they synonymous and interchangeable. After a lengthy review of the literature, we are closer to that answer but keep finding issues with how the terms are measured. Most recently, several researchers have examined these as distinct terms, but they measure the constructs using items that one author claims are SCA while others claim the items measure SCR. While the goal of this research is to develop a new theoretical framework, the research team is seeking to better understand the variables that they feel are significant in their goal to prescribe a good way to support a hybrid work environment for manufacturing firms. During this Treo talk we will discuss the issues when different researchers call synonymous constructs different names and measure them either similarly or differently. We will share our thoughts on how to determine the best constructs and items to measure those constructs.