Inclusive Organizational Infrastructure and Supply Chain Operational Value through Coordination and Integrative Capability

Abstract Debate over whether diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) belongs in the operational core of the firm has intensified rather than settled because of an unresolved analytical problem: the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) literature documents that inclusion is associated with organizational outcomes without specifying the operational machinery producing that association. We reframe inclusion as inclusive organizational infrastructure - the configuration of workforce diversity, structural equity and inclusive culture that determines whose knowledge legitimately enters operational decision processes - and model its conversion into operational value as a translation architecture. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, supported by inclusion climate, social capital and relational view arguments, we theorize that inclusive infrastructure activates three distinct coordination mechanisms (internal, inter-organizational and boundary-spanning), that these crystallize into integrative operational capability, which is converted into operational value realization. Survey data from 264 food export enterprises in Vietnam and China were analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling, bootstrapped mediation decomposition, measurement-invariance testing, multi-group analysis and necessary condition analysis. Coordination and integrative capability jointly transmit 47.2% of the total effect of inclusive infrastructure on operational value, with inter-organizational and boundary-spanning routes carrying most of the indirect effect. Network coordination complexity negatively moderates the capability-to-value relationship, and multi-group evidence indicates that the conversion of inter-organizational and boundary-spanning coordination into capability is significant only under low complexity while the direct infrastructure-to-value relationship persists, a pattern we term compressed capability translation . Necessary condition analysis shows that integrative capability is a degree-dependent prerequisite, not merely a predictor.