• Korean small business review
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.79-105
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• 2020

While individual enterprises with different objectives each other within supply chains require a variety of resources to achieve their own seeking goals and performances, it is necessary to form interdependent relationships among the enterprises to secure the resources what they need, as the individual enterprises are supposed to have limitations on such as time, space and cost to secure all the resources. In this process, conflict possibilities rise and opportunistic behaviors increase due to those environmental factors such as unbalanced information among enterprises, limited rationality, pursuit of interests, and risk aversion. Those existing studies on conflicts in the field of supply chains have limitations in that they failed to present specific conflict management strategies based on the conflict types from the perspective of the conflict resolution mechanism as the studies have made only focused on investigating the causes of conflicts and the impact of conflicts on performance. In this study, therefore, it used the TKI model of Kilmann and Thomas(1977) to subdivide the conflict management strategies in the process of transactions within supply chains by enterprises, and looked into the impact on partnership and performance according to each strategy. As the results, it showed that those types of conflict management strategies such as concession type and cooperation type had a positive(+) impact on the relationship commitment as a factor of partnership, and it was identified that the relationship commitment had a positive(+) impact on performance. In other words, it can be considered that the enterprises making use of the concession type & the cooperation type conflict management strategies under the situation of conflict would be able to have a very positive impact on their performances if they can make good relationship commitment such as investments in and efforts for the sustainable relationship along with the conflict management, while recognizing the importance of relationship. The most important meaning of this study lies on in terms of that it would be contributable to strengthening the partnership between enterprises and minimizing the risk of supply chains caused by conflicts through these results from the study.