Coping With Dependence: A Logistics Strategy Based on Interorganizational Learning for Managing Buyer–Supplier Relations

The rise of outsourcing has heightened interest in the role of logistics managers in coping with dependence in buyer–supplier relations. Buying firm dependence on a supplier potentially reduces supplier performance to expectations because the buying firm cannot leverage power to capture value in the relationship. Drawing from interorganizational learning theory, we advance a logistics strategy that consists of supplier cost analysis and supplier integration as a means to create value and thereby mitigate the negative effects of dependence. By facilitating the acquisition and use of knowledge, supplier cost analysis and supplier integration enable buying firms to identify improvement opportunities while engaging in collaborative supplier relations. Using survey responses from 222 buying firms, we find that while buyer dependence decreases the buyer's perceived supplier performance, supplier integration suppresses these negative effects. Furthermore, we show that supplier cost analysis is a valuable knowledge acquisition tool that logistics managers can use to enable supplier integration as a relational form of governance. As such, we provide new insights into interorganizational learning theory and suggest to logistics managers the important role supplier cost analysis plays in managing buyer–supplier relationships.     

Multimarket Contact and the Use of Power in Buyer–Supplier Relationships

Buyers and suppliers often have multiple business relationships with each other across different geographical and product markets, forming a potentially complex web of connections. What happens between the firms in one geographical or product market may influence their interactions in others. Prior research in strategic management has found that similar multimarket contact in horizontal relationships between competitors has important consequences for the firms’ use of market power. However, the consequences of multimarket contact in vertical buyer–supplier relationships remain unexplored. Building on resource‐advantage theory, this study proposes that multimarket contact between buyers and suppliers is linked to their respective propensity to use three types of mediated power in their relationships (i.e., reward, coercion, and legal legitimate) and that the effects of multimarket contact differ between buyers and suppliers. A vignette study with 143 purchasing managers and 137 business‐to‐business sales managers tests the developed hypotheses. The findings show that a higher level of multimarket contact encourages suppliers to use legal legitimate power to a greater extent and encourages buyers to use reward power to a greater extent but legal legitimate power to a lesser extent.     

基于领导—成员交换视角的组织公平与组织认同关系研究

目前,组织认同已经被越来越多的学者和企业家所关注.然而,对于其形成机制的研究还有待进一步的扩展.文章选取组织公平这一角度来研究组织认同形成的机理.检验了在中国情境下组织支持感在组织公平与组织认同关系中的中介作用,尤其重点探讨了公平感与组织认同关系链中领导-成员交换的调节效应和直接效应.文章以北京市6家企业的294名员工作为样本收集数据,进行统计检验.研究结果发现:组织公平促进员工组织支持感的形成,进而培育起员工的组织认同;领导-成员交换质量高时,组织公平更容易形成组织认同;领导-成员交换质量的改善会直接促进组织认同的形成.最后,讨论了文章研究的理论意义和对当前管理实践的启示和建议.     

Hypocrisies of Fairness: Towards a More Reflexive Ethical Base in Organizational Justice Research and Practice

Despite becoming one of the most active research areas in organizational behavior, the field of organizational justice has stayed at a safe distance from moral questions of values, as well as from critical questions regarding the implications of fairness considerations on the status quo of power relations in today’s organizations. We argue that both organizational justice research and the managerial practices it informs lack reflexivity. This manifests itself in two possible hypocrisies of fairness. Managers may apply organizational justice knowledge but fail to increase the actual levels of fairness in employment relations. Researchers, on the other hand, may claim to promote fairness through their work while actually providing managers with tools that enable or even encourage them to feed the hypocrisy of fairness identified above. As␣part of our argument, we identify three types of mechanisms managers may use to influence and manage the formation of fairness perceptions. We consider how the exercise of power is related to the potential application of organizational justice knowledge across individual, interpersonal and social levels. Our approach makes power dynamics and moral implications salient, and questions the purely subjectivist view of justice researchers that deliberately discards normative aspects. The questions opened up by considering alternative mechanisms for creating fairness perceptions have led us to formulate a research agenda for organizational justice research that takes multiple stakeholder interests, power dynamics and ethical implications into account. We believe that the fields of organizational justice and normative justice can benefit from combined research. Marion Fortin (Ph.D., Trinity College Dublin) is Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the Durham Business School, Durham University. Marion previously worked in the financial industry and also was a visiting scholar at the Stern School, NYU. Marion’s main research interest lies in the role of justice judgments in the workplace. Her current and past research projects also involve issues of organizational change, power mechanisms, and the role of emotions in organizations. Martin R. Fellenz (Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the School of Business, University of Dublin, Trinity College. His research interests include organizational justice, organizational transformation and change, teaching and learning, and the development of theory and theory schools. He regularly contributes to executive education programs in a variety of countries and consults with leading international public, private and not-for-profit organizations on matters of leadership, management development, and organizational transformation. A previous version of this paper was originally presented at the IESE Business School, University of Navarra, for the 14th International Symposium on Ethics, Business and Society: “Towards a Comprehensive Integration of Ethics Into Management: Problems and Prospects”. May 18–19, 2006).     

要素－产品比价研究：国际经验与历史证据

中国要素价格决定机制不合理、要素价格体系扭曲,已经达成普遍共识。瓦尔拉斯一般均衡理论表明,市场机制通过价格信号配置资源,均衡价格体系由最优交换比率或比价关系界定。相对价格比绝对价格更有意义,比价变化是价格合理性识别的关键。本文借助历史研究方法,利用大量国际历史数据,考察主要发达国家产品－要素价格调整历史、探究其一般发展规律,以期为研究我国要素价格问题提供国际经验和历史参照系。     

Stigma and Settling Up: An Integrated Approach to the Consequences of Organizational Misconduct for Organizational Elites

In this article, I address the question of the apportionment of the consequences of organizational misconduct to individual members of the organizational elite. I argue that this process can be best understood by marrying the behavioral aspects of stigma theory to the economic mechanisms of ex post settling up. Viewed in conjunction with stigmatization, ex post settling up following organizational misconduct can be seen as the result of attempts to avoid stigma by association. Efforts at stigma avoidance on the parts of various stakeholders produce the diminished social interaction associated with ex post settling up: departure from the focal firm, and loss of seats on other boards. This also suggests that the process of stigmatization, and hence ex post settling up, can be influenced by characteristics of social interaction unrelated to the misconduct itself. Jo-Ellen Pozner’s research addresses the social processes that differentiate what is legitimate from what is illegitimate in organizational practice, and how changing definitions of legitimacy affect organizations and individuals.     

Inter‐Organizational Learning in Supply Chains: A Focus on Logistics Service Providers and Their Customers

The learning process between supply chain entities is explored from the perspective of senior third‐party executives. Through grounded theory, a theoretical framework emerged that extends our understanding of learning within a supply chain by identifying the major constructs and learning stages comprising the basic social process of inter‐organizational learning. This framework provides significant insights into the complex process employed in a supply chain to share, disseminate, and store information; co‐create knowledge; and to derive a competitive advantage.     

The Direct and Indirect Effects of Organizational Justice on the Human Factor through Mutual Commitment in Ghana and India: A Comparative Analysis

This study compares the influence of perceived procedural justice, interactional justice, and mutual commitment on the human factor in Ghana and India. The study further compares how mutual commitment mediates the relationship between procedural and interactional justice, and the human factor in the two countries. The findings indicate that the influence of both procedural and interactional justices on mutual commitment in Ghana and India are similar. However, the influence of procedural and interactional justices on the human factor, and the impact of mutual commitment on the human factor in Ghana and India are significantly different. While mutual commitment mediates the relationship between procedural and interactional justice in the two countries, the findings from Ghana is different from that from India. We discuss the implications of our findings.     

Critical Theoretical Considerations of Public Relations Messaging Around the Globe: Tools for Creating and Evaluating Campaign Messages

This study employs several critical theories in order to demonstrate their explanatory power in understanding public relations communication, globalization within campaign communication, and, in particular, some sample campaign messages drawn from public relations research and practice. In particular, critical theories of cultural studies, semiotics, and postmodernism inform the design and understanding of public relations messages through the tools of analysis they offer and through the rich vocabulary they provide. This study argues that public relations is the logical business communication discipline to develop theory and research into campaign message design and globalization issues utilizing the critical paradigm.     

Antecedents and Performance Outcomes of Strategic Environmental Sourcing: An Investigation of Resource‐Based Process and Contingency Effects

This study develops an understanding of the antecedents and performance‐related consequences of strategic environmental sourcing (SES). Institutional pressure and the firm's environmental engagement serve as antecedents to SES, with performance dimensions including environmental, product development, and product quality performance. While direct relationships between these dimensions and SES have been studied in prior work, the present research adds greater specificity and depth by investigating process and contingency effects on product‐level outcomes. The resource‐based theory provides the theoretical motivation for these relationships, which are tested via survey data collected from sourcing professionals in the U.S. manufacturing industry. The results emphasize environmental engagement as an important process element between institutional pressure and SES, and highlight the ability of institutional pressure to strengthen the relationship between environmental engagement and SES. Environmental performance was found as an influential conduit in the relationship between SES and both product quality and product development performance, with SES also serving as a contingency.     

Regular Price $299; Pre-order Price $199: Price Promotion for a Pre-ordered Product and the Moderating Role of Temporal Orientation

Retailers typically use the strategy of providing a discount to induce the sale of a new product at a pre-order stage. Despite the prevalence of this strategy, providing discounts might not be effective for all consumers. The present research shows that the positive effect of a discount depends on consumer temporal orientation. Results from four experimental studies reveal that a large discount positively affects present-oriented, but not future-oriented, consumers. The findings suggest that perceived financial risk and perceived product quality sequentially mediate the effect of discount size on value toward the deal and purchase intention. A third-party product quality rating boosts quality perceptions, which in turn reduces perceived financial risk and positively enhances value toward the deal along with purchase intention. Our findings demonstrate that when the brand itself acts as a reliable signal of quality, a discount has its intended effect for both present- and future-oriented consumers. Overall, the findings of this research suggest that a retailer can use quality cues along with a discount, especially for a new brand, to appeal to the broadest group, as it will attract both future- and present-oriented consumers.     

Sense and sensibility in personalized e‐commerce: How emotions rebalance the purchase intentions of persuaded customers

This research develops and tests a theoretical model of customer persuasion in personalized online shopping, building on information processing theory, and addressing cognitive and affective stages of the persuasion process. Data from 582 experienced online customers were used to validate the proposed model through structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis. Results show that quality of personalization, message quality, and benefits of the personalized recommendations are important in the persuasion process. Positive emotions increase the effect of persuasion on purchase intentions, contrary to negative emotions. The study extends online personalization theory, offers an in‐depth analysis of the persuasion process in online shopping, and provides valuable recommendations for personalized online marketing.     

我国房价与银行信贷关系研究——基于面板数据的边限协整分析

房价在历史上的信贷危机中大都表现出巨大的起伏变化,在本次美国爆发的次贷危机中尤为明显。从理论上来说,房价与银行信贷之间存在多层次的双向因果关系,但目前国内外的相关研究却相对缺乏且结论不一。因此,文章结合相关面板数据分析我国房价与银行信贷间的联动关系,并从货币政策、银行经营及监管等角度探讨维护金融稳定的措施。     

Costly Signaling: Asian Americans and the Role of Ethnicity in the Willingness to Pay More for Socially Responsible Products

The present study applies motivated reasoning and costly signaling theory to examine whether consumers transfer stereotypical race-related attributes to their evaluations of companies' socially responsible advertisements. The study compares corporate socially responsible advertisements featuring different model races and cultural cues in order to meet consumers' motives to impress others by supporting CSR initiatives. Results (N = 754) of a 2 × 2 × 4 experiment reveal that strong ethnic identifiers among Asian Americans are more likely to make a costly signaling behavior when ads feature a white model with white cultural cues by attributing higher social status to whites' images, which is mediated by conspicuous consumption motives. Interestingly, ethnic identification among white Americans is also a strong predictor in making costly signaling behavior with socially responsible products.     

Brand value chain in practise; the relationship between mindset and market performance metrics: A study of the Swedish market for FMCG

For decades, managers have analysed, planned and implemented long-term brand strategies based on customer mindset metrics (MSMs). Typically, such MSMs are customer satisfaction, liking, brand preference and Net Promoter Score (NPS). One of the core pillars, in brand management literature, is the assumed link between certain customer-based brand assets, often operationalized as MSMs, and future long-term market performance. However, few studies have systematically and broadly evaluated how the most common MSMs relate to actual performance data. This study investigates the link between the customer MSMs, most commonly used by practitioners, and their relationships with actual market performance. The paper explores 10 MSMs and 14 market performance metrics, in 10 categories, in the Swedish fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) market. The study is based on survey data from 2007 that is compared to purchase panel household data from 2007 and 2010. Although MSMs are highly correlated to each other, their relations to brands' long-term market performance differ. A more nuanced approach to the MSM-market performance link is proposed, as there appears to be no single “silver bullet” MSM to rely on. Using a cash flow-oriented framework, the authors recommend opting for different MSMs depending on which of the three generic types of market performance (enhanced, sustained or accelerated) are targeted.     

Moving beyond the mechanistic structures: The role of inclusive leadership in developing change‐oriented organizational citizenship behaviour

In this study, we explore the relationship between inclusive leadership and change‐oriented organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) with the mediating roles of behavioural integrity and trust in leadership. Data were collected from 151 supervisor–subordinate dyads from small and medium enterprises in Pakistan. The results revealed that inclusive leadership is positively related to change‐oriented OCB. Our study reaffirms the indirect effect of the inclusive leadership on change‐oriented OCB via behavioural integrity and trust in leadership. Finally, the results supported the chain of causality: sequential mediation of behavioural integrity, and trust in leadership between inclusive leadership and change‐oriented OCB. Causal attribution theory is used to support the findings. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

The Yin and Yang of entrepreneurship: Gender differences in the importance of communal and agentic characteristics for entrepreneurs' subjective well-being and performance

This research examines gender differences in the relationships of entrepreneurs' agentic and communal personality characteristics with measures of subjective well-being and new venture performance. Results from a stratified national (USA) random sample of founding CEOs (N = 303) demonstrate the advantages of an agentic characteristic (creativity) for women and a communal characteristic (teamwork) for men, with regard to the respective abilities of such persons to achieve high levels of subjective well-being and new venture performance. These relative advantages for women and men were mediated by perceptions of person-work fit.     

Modes of production in home maintenance: accounting for the choice between formality,off the books and self‐provisioning

Households depend on the existence of a home, and therefore, maintenance plays an important social and economic role. Formal outsourcing is often overestimated here and alternative modes, such as informal outsourcing and do‐it‐yourself (DIY), are overlooked. This paper estimates and accounts for the choice of one mode of production in Flemish households. First, the different modes of production are quantified according to two different methods. Further, an explanation of the choice made is constructed. The complexity of maintenance work has an impact as well as the dimensions of social and cultural capital. Factors such as dexterity, occupational acquaintance with maintenance work, social trust and social contacts play a role. Finally, a model of a sequence of decisions is tested. This ramification mechanism shows that the primary choice is formal commissioning or not, inspired by technical complexity. The second choice between off‐the‐books outsourcing and DIY is influenced by the capital resources of the households.