The Impact of Cooperativeness Supply Chain Performances

Abstract

In this paper we analysed the relation between cooperativeness as a personality trait of participants in a supply chain and the bullwhip effect. We explored the possibility of change participants' cooperativeness but we also showed the learning process of engineering students. In order to teach our students about behavioural causes of the bullwhip effect and to increase their awareness about the influence of their cooperativeness on decision making in the supply chain, we simulated decision making in the beer game performed by four groups of engineering students. The beer game is a role-play simulation game that lets students (or managers as well) experience typical coordination problems of supply chains. Participant cooperativeness is determined using a Social Value Orientation (SVO) questionnaire, applied before playing the game to classify them into cooperative and uncooperative ones and after playing the game to investigate changes of cooperativeness. Participants were assigned randomly to one of the two situations: a chain with and without sharing information. The experiment conducted twice - firstly with 20 engineering students, and secondly with other 22 engineering students. The results, showing lower costs within the team with cooperative behaviour tendencies and permission to share relevant information, point to the importance of the further study of the behavioural causes. Students realized that their behaviour influences the behaviour of others and how that can change the results of the team. After playing the game students filed SVO questionnaire again, and we showed that students who shared information increased their cooperativeness scores, while cooperative participants who couldn't share information decreased their cooperativeness scores, so we found that students can learn cooperativeness to achieve better supply chain results.