Ahead of the game: Antecedents for the success of shared service centers

Philipp Clemens Richter and Rolf Brühl

European Management Journal, 2020, vol. 38, issue 3, 477-488

Abstract: Shared service centers (SSCs) are firms’ new paradigm for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness in business support activities. Studies show that firms with SSCs can reduce costs up to 30% compared to firms using conventional organizational concepts. Because previous research provides only a few descriptive case studies that comprehensively report how firms implement SSCs, our knowledge regarding antecedents for implementation success (IS) is scarce. This paper addresses this gap, identifies antecedents, and theorizes how they affect the IS of SSCs by drawing on dynamic capability view and organizational design literature. We test a set of hypotheses with survey data from 164 SSC managers in index-listed European firms. Our results show that dynamic capabilities—reshaping capability and IT capability—and the organizational structure of support activities are important antecedents of successful SSC implementation. Overall, we contribute to the shared service literature by shedding theoretical and empirical light on a hitherto largely neglected theme: the antecedents for the successful implementation of SSCs.

Keywords: Dynamic capabilities; Operational capabilities; Organizational structure; Shared services; Partial least square (PLS) analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eurman:v:38:y:2020:i:3:p:477-488

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DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2019.10.006

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