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1. Introduction
With globalization characterized by unpredictable new market trends and unstable customer behaviors, competence-based on-time logistics has significantly changed business operations (Bouncken et al., 2015). Consequently, logistics management is becoming a critical component of organizational management processes and contemporary supply chains (Sanchez Rodrigues et al., 2015).
In many cases, organizations make necessary changes to their logistics activities to maintain or increase their competitiveness. Thus, logistics is a strategic tool that allows companies to face adverse situations, create competitive advantages, increase customer value and achieve collaborative advantage within supply chains (Lee et al., 2016). From this perspective, logistics is a proactive means to take advantage of a challenging environment.
Logistics operates on two planes. The first is the proper organization structure and the design of a supply chain network to tackle the rising logistics costs and complexity of operations management in current conditions (Michalski et al., 2017). The second is the strategic deployment of logistics activities to increase performance. These two planes are not exclusive: choosing a strategy for designing the structure and management processes could simultaneously improve the performance and competitiveness of logistics activities (Fugate et al., 2010; Stank et al., 2001).
These outcomes can only be realized if organizations provide logistics activities of sufficient quality to meet customers' expectations. The quality of logistics activities is widely recognized as key to organization profitability and customer satisfaction (Ding et al., 2014; Juga et al., 2010; Mauri et al., 2013). However, managers face the ongoing problem of knowing to what extent the offered and provided logistics services meet customers' expectations. To solve this problem, the quality of logistics services must be continuously measured (Rafele, 2004) and compared against sectorial standards (Thai et al., 2014), reflecting best practices for managing these processes.
Organizations assess the quality of the logistics services they provide to customers (Kilibarda et al., 2016). Although this is valuable knowledge, improving quality is impossible without knowing if internal processes are sufficient to attain the desired quality level. High logistics service quality (LSQ) may increase responsiveness to environmental changes due to improved visibility and operational knowledge (Lee et al., 2016), especially when there is high instability in external relationships.
According to contingency theory,...