Content area
Full Text
1 Introduction
The automotive industry is the major Thailand's competitive industry in the international market. Therefore, the Thai Government has a policy that promotes Thailand to become a global hub of the automotive industry. A dedicated national institute known as Thailand Automotive Institute (TAI) has been established to promote the automotive industry in Thailand. Between 1998 and 2010, the number of cars manufactured in Thailand grew dramatically by 1,049 percent (87.38 percent per year) from 143,250 to 1,645,304 ([55] TAI, 2011). Due to the tremendous size of the industry, the automotive supply chain is very complex and the Thai automotive industry is active in supply chain management (SCM) and total quality management (TQM).
Although SCM and TQM have become critical management systems to achieve competitive advantage in the global market ([58], [59] Vanichchinchai and Igel, 2009, 2011; [48] Talib et al. , 2011), their contribution can be varied by the degree of success in their implementation ([59] Vanichchinchai and Igel, 2011). As such, the introduction of both SCM and TQM in the organizations can be different by factors such as corporate culture, investment, business relationship and management system maturity which in turn are influenced by organizational characteristics such as company ownership, company size, tier in the supply chain and management system certification. Research in their linkages in the automotive industry in Thailand is needed. Although, there were some researches in the relationship between organizational characteristics and TQM, they are different in countries, constructs and organizational characteristics. Since, SCM has been later developed research, a research in the differences across organizational characteristic on SCM is rare. Some researchers also suggested studying the linkages between organizational characteristics and SCM ([29], [28] Li et al. , 2005, 2006; [27] Li and Lin, 2006; [59] Vanichchinchai and Igel, 2011).
Therefore, there is a need to find if there are differences across organizational characteristics such as company ownership, company size, tier in the supply chain and ISO/TS 16949 certification on supply chain management practices (SCMP), total quality management practices (TQMP) and firm's supply performance (FSP) of Thailand's automotive industry. These are important characteristics and should have influences on management practices and performance. Former researches by [59] Vanichchinchai and Igel (2011), [16] Hoang et al. (2006), [29], [28] Li et al.