66:1 (2014) 53–60 | www.jurnalteknologi.utm.my | eISSN 2289-5434 | Full paper Jurnal Teknologi (Social Sciences) The Role of Supply Chain Antecedents on Supply Chain Agility in SMEs: The Conceptual Framework Mahdi Mohammad Bagheri a* , Abu Bakar Abdul Hamid a,b , Iraj Soltani c , Abbas Mardani a , Ehsan Kish Hazrate Soltan a a Faculty of Management, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia b Visiting Professor at MITRANS c Faculty of Management, Islamic Azad University, Science Research Branch, Esfahan, Iran *Corresponding author: mahdi_moba@yahoo.com Article history Received :30 June 2013 Received in revised form : 21 November 2013 Accepted :15 December 2013 Abstract Firms must be agile for the reason that being responsive is a crucial competency for them in present global economy. Organizations that are agile happen to be more successful. The agility of an organization is dependent on the agility of its supply chain. The main aim of this paper is to give a new dimension in explaining how Trust, Information Technology (IT) and agility can create sustained competitive advantage for firms and develop an integrated framework to facilitate this. For the literature review of the related academic articles for the previous studies has been taken by international journals in Logistics, Supply Chain Management and Operations Management. Achievement of supply chain agility (SCA) is linked to the other organization’s resources, namely trust, IT and firm performance that play mediator role between them. IT is considered as a competitive tool by researchers and practitioners. Therefore, it is crucial for managers to apply their firms' IT and trust as lower-order organizational capabilities to improve agility as a higher-order organizational capability. Hence, the current article gives a conceptual framework to ascertain factors which affect SCA and finally firm performance. The findings of this study will present interesting information and insight about how to improve agility in small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). Moreover, the information presented in this study will be the foundation of future supply chain capability studies. To aid the study, this present study for develop the framework has been used the RBV theory. The paper also proposes the framework for future research in empirical investigation in companies. The study related the gap by developing a framework for measuring SCA, which enables any organization to identify critical success factors for sense and respond to market. Keywords: Information technology (IT); Resource based view (RBV); Supply chain agility (SCA); trust © 2014 Penerbit UTM Press. All rights reserved. 1.0 INTRODUCTION Agility has been recognized as the one of the most prominent features of coeval Supply Chain Management (SCM) (Lee, 2004). Notwithstanding its importance, there has been little development of theory in the area of SCA. SCA’s antecedents, described as the ability of a firm to rapidly adjust its supply chain operations and tactics Gligor and Holcomb (2012), have been mainly directed towards operational level. They stressed that to find out firm SCA Strategic-level antecedents more research is required. The work of Braunscheidel and Suresh (2009) has further been extended, who examined the function of various managerial positions for attaining SCA. Trust as antecedent has been examined by this study and its effect on the ability of IT to improve SCA, this study may help in understanding and eliminating hindrances which negatively affect agility and previous studies have not addressed this issue (DeGroote, 2011; Liu et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2011). Consequently, a prime contribution of this paper is the extension of theory by studying SCA strategic-level antecedents. Despite the advantages of agility been broadly recognized across many fields (Christopher, 2000; Van Oyen, 2001; Wilson, 2011; Zhang, 2011), little research covers the effect of IT and trust on firm SCA (Bagheri et al., 2013; Gligor and Holcomb, 2012; Gligor and Holcomb, 2012b; Swafford et al., 2008). Scholars have called for more research to deeply understand performance results of firm SCA and emphasized the necessity to empirically investigate such outcomes from an efficiency and effectiveness perspective (Gligor and Holcomb, 2012).Therefore, by providing a greater comprehension of ways in which supply chain antecedents impact firm SCA, the paper advances the theory development in this respect. The theoretical lens of the firm’s RBV, on which the current research relies, propels the generation of research hypotheses and helps in