Oliver Koll

Balanced versus focused responsiveness to core constituencies and organizational effectiveness

Purpose – To test how responsiveness to key organizational stakeholders (owners, customers, employees) is related to organizational effectiveness (OE). Focused versus balanced strategies of responsiveness are compared.Design/methodology/approach – Employs Boolean algebra to study performance of 69 companies in three industries over a ten‐year period. Responsiveness to key stakeholders and performance are measured using publicly available data provided by these organizations (Compustat by Standard & Poors).Findings – Provides evidence that balanced responsiveness to multiple constituencies is more likely to lead to high OE than focused responsiveness to a single one. Trade‐offs in responsiveness to key stakeholders are found supporting the idea that serving multiple interests is challenging. Most results are not industry‐specific – the usefulness of a balanced strategy of responsiveness may be generalized.Research limitations/implications – Responsiveness embraces organizational behaviors not covered by a...

One brand perception? Or many? The heterogeneity of intra‐brand knowledge

Purpose – What customers associate with a brand is the result of what they have felt, learnt, seen and heard about the brand. This knowledge impacts the attitudinal and behavioral brand response of customers (and vice versa). This paper aims to identify how customer segments of one brand characterized by different levels of behavioral and attitudinal response intensity differ in terms of content and structure of brand associations..Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports findings of two single‐brand studies, each comparing brand associations of customer groups with different brand response intensity levels: one in a business‐to‐customer (B2C) setting where knowledge is determined via brand‐to‐association retrieval, one in a business‐to‐business (B2B) setting with benefit‐to‐brand retrieval.Findings – The findings show that consumer segments with differing behavioral and attitudinal brand response intensity show unique brand knowledge patterns. Consumers with high response intensity elicit more (fa...

Participatory group observation – a tool to analyze strategic decision making

Group decisions have taken a prominent part in strategic decision making but managerial research still lacks techniques to study these interpersonal processes comprehensively. Assuming that efficient decision making depends on shared cognitive structures within groups, an approach to analyze these structures and the affective and communicative dimensions causing convergence/divergence of individual cognitions is introduced. Suitable methods to study these variables are discussed and applied in an actual strategic decision to be made by a management team. The method shows a high degree of realism and preciseness in analyzing strategic group decisions.

STAKEHOLDER VALUE CREATION AND FIRM SUCCESS

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

Prozessorientierte Messung von Kundenzufriedenheit in hochintegrativen Geschäftsbeziehungen

Kundenzufriedenheit wird allgemein als Voraussetzung fur den Geschaftserfolg anerkannt (Simon und Homburg 1995). Anderson und Sullivan (1993) betrachten Kundenzufriedenheit sogar als eine Art Versicherung: „Investing in customer satisfaction is like taking out an insurance policy. If some hardship temporarily befalls the firm, customers will be more likely to remain loyal“ (p. 140). Diese auserordentliche Bedeutung hat bei Akademikern und Praktikern zu einer intensiven Beschaftigung mit der Messung und Steuerung von Kundenzufriedenheit gefuhrt.

Do Method and Lack of Context Explain Low Stability of Brand Associations? No!

Scholars report low stability of brand-attribute associations in free choice affirmative binary rating tasks (“yes”-option, ticked or not, indicating whether a brand has a specific attribute or not). A multi-brand meta-analysis by Rungie, Laurent, Rily, Morrison and Roy (2005) reports stability levels of 49% over a period of three months; another by Dolnicar and Rossiter (2008) an average of 53% for 20 brands with a one-week interval between two measurements. Dolnicar and Rossiter (2008) provide a set of recommendations to attain higher levels of stability, for example shorter questionnaires, or sampling only category users and brand aware respondents.