Nicole Franziska Richter

A critical look at the use of SEM in International Business research

Purpose – Structural equation modeling (SEM) has been widely used to examine complex research models in international business and marketing research. While the covariance-based SEM (CB-SEM) approach is dominant, the authors argue that the field’s dynamic nature and the sometimes early stage of theory development more often require a partial least squares SEM (PLS-SEM) approach. The purpose of this paper is to critically review the application of SEM techniques in the field. Design/methodology/approach – The authors searched six journals with an international business (and marketing) focus (Management International Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of International Management, International Marketing Review, Journal of World Business, International Business Review) from 1990 to 2013. The authors reviewed all articles that apply SEM, analyzed their research objectives and methodology choices, and assessed whether the PLS-SEM papers followed the best practices outlined in the past. ...

Intra-Regional Sales and the Internationalization and Performance Relationship

This study provides a deeper insight into the performance effects of internationalization of the most international multinational enterprises (MNEs). Most MNEs perform their business activities within their home-regional block of the world – North America, Europe or the Asia-Pacific block. Whether these regional strategies pay off is explored by means of two analyses: first, the impact of internationalization in terms of the transnationality index, and second, the impact of foreign intra-regional sales on performance is examined. Results indicate that regional strategies smooth performance declines in the early stages of internationalization but also smooth performance increases during a phase of high-foreign expansion.

Power distance and its moderating role in the relationship between situational job characteristics and job satisfaction: An empirical analysis using different cultural measures

Purpose – Power distance describes a central facet of national culture, because it influences the acceptance and endorsement of job characteristics related to status and power. This has major implications for international human resource management, because the importance of different situational job characteristics for employee job satisfaction should differ across cultures. The purpose of this paper is to analyse if and how national power distance levels moderate different situational job characteristics’ influence on job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – The authors refer to three approaches to culture: the frameworks of Hofstede and GLOBE as well as to current scores provided in a meta-analysis. The empirical findings are derived using regression analyses on a sample covering 16 nations. Findings – The results are convincing regarding the basic job satisfaction driver model not involving culture. However, the results on power distance’s impact as well as its moderating role are strongly depe...

The Customer Loyalty Cascade and Its Impact on Profitability in Financial Services

Building and maintaining successful, long-term relationships is one of the crucial tasks in today’s financial sector, the idea being that loyal customers purchase more, demonstrate a higher willingness to spend, and act as advocates for the company. However, there is also some controversy on whether profitability indeed increases with customer loyalty. We will analyze the process of loyalty development and evaluate if and how customer loyalty (positively) affects profitability. We will do so with reference to a four stage sequential loyalty model that grounds on a chain of effects from cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, conative loyalty to action loyalty. We will make use of PLS structural equation modeling and analyze data of almost 7000 customers of a German bank surveyed by telephone. These analyses will support practitioners in the banking and financial sector in setting-up and steering their customer retention strategies and will provide a theoretical contribution to validating one of the most prominent customer loyalty models.

Cultural Intelligence and Work-related Outcomes: A Meta-analytic Review

Over the last 15 years the research on cultural intelligence (CQ) has grown to a point that a quantitative synthesis of the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between CQ and work-relat...

Neue Technologien im stationären Einzelhandel: Mobile Apps oder stationäre Geräte?

Der Boom des Onlinevertriebs ist zu einer der grosen Herausforderungen fur den stationaren Einzelhandel geworden. Um dieser Herausforderung zu begegnen, sind in der Praxis eine Reihe von Pilotprojekten auf den Weg gebracht worden, die neue Technologien dazu einsetzen, Produkt- und Handlerinformationen auch im stationaren Einzelhandel besser zuganglich zu machen.

The influence of organizational structure on international purchasing success

International purchasing is one of the most important strategic topics for managers and attracts more and more interest among researchers. Yet, research often lacks strong theoretical and systematic insights on the intricacies of purchasing success and does not make enough use of advanced empirical methods. We apply a structural equation modeling technique to better research into the intricacies of higher or lower purchasing performance owing to different organizational design choices. We build our model on the resource-based view and on transaction cost economics and make use of survey data of purchasers engaging in international sourcing activities. We find four important drivers of purchasing performance, namely specialization, configuration, standardization and centralization. The importance of these drivers seems to be contingent on the sourcing environments, namely on the characteristics attributed to high cost and low cost countries.

Culture's Role in the Job Characteristics and Job Satisfaction Relationship: An Empirical Analysis Using Globe's Culture Scores

Many studies have analyzed the influence of either situational job characteristics or culture on job satisfaction. To date, the interrelationships between these two aspects – situational job characteristics and culture – have received very little attention. Assuming that culture is an overarching framework, we analyze if and how it moderates different job characteristics’ influence on job satisfaction. When testing culture’s moderating effect, we refer to all dimensions of culture defined in the most current conception, namely the GLOBE project. We analyze these relationships based on a sample from 23 nations. Findings indicated that the impact of some job characteristics on job satisfaction is indeed significantly moderated by culture, but the explanatory power is fairly negligible.

Firms' Financial Benefits and Costs of Internationalization Today

In this paper, we collect and contrast theoretical arguments on the benefits and costs of internationalization and develop a comprehensive and structured overview of different theoretical concepts. We also critically evaluate these concepts in terms of their practical importance: this refers to both the relevance for multinational firms (MNEs) today, and to the specificity or applicability to what we term benefits and costs from a financial accounting perspective. We find a slight overweight of positive financial effects of internationalization, which – however – is less clear as might practically have been assumed. Without directly incorporating contextual or management aspects, we are unable to draw theoretical inference on a strong positive or negative development of financial positions. This paper therefore provides a conceptualization of different cost and revenue developments – nothing more, but also nothing less.

Internationalization and performance – Higher or lower administration costs?

Firms’ international investments in foreign locations have been constant over the last decades. Today, these international activities are mainly motivated by increasing firm performance in terms of access to foreign markets and resources, such as materials and labor, at favorable prices (see DIHK 2011). The objective of increasing the overall firm performance is not always met, however, as can be seen from empirical results (and theoretical arguments), which range from internationalization’s generally positive or negative implications to its curvilinear performance effects (e.g., u, inverted u, and s-curve links). Glaum/Oesterle (2007) summarized this dilemma under the heading “40 Years of Research on Internationalization and Performance: More Questions than Answers?” Kirca et al. (2011), too believe that “researchers have only begun to explore the challenges related to international expansion and its performance implications” (Kirca et al. 2011, p. 65). The failure to meet performance objectives is mainly found to be due to increased information, coordination, and management costs during internationalization (Boddewyn 1988; Michel/Shaked 1986; Zaheer/Mosakowski 1997; Ruigrok/Wagner 2003).