Philip L. Dawes

Guanxi, Trust, and Long-Term Orientation in Chinese Business Markets

This research focuses on buying firms’ trust in a suppliers salesperson and posits that this type of trust is determined by characteristics of the salesperson, the interpersonal relationships between a salesperson and the buying firms boundary personnel, and characteristics of personal interactions between these two parties. More important, the authors discuss the concept of interpersonal relationships in the context of Chinese culture and model it as a three-dimensional latent construct, which, in some literature, is called guanxi. A key aspect of this research is that the authors investigate the impact of each dimension of guanxi on salesperson trust separately. Moreover, the authors consider the buying firms trust in the supplying firm and its long-term orientation toward the supplier the consequences of salesperson trust. To test the model, the authors use data collected from 128 buying organizations in Hong Kong. The sampled firms are from both the government and private sectors.

Antecedents of conflict in marketing's cross‐functional relationship with sales

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model of the factors that explain the level of interpersonal conflict between marketing managers and sales managers. The paper aims to establish the overall level of interpersonal conflict in the full sample and in the two sampled countries (UK and Australia).Design/methodology/approach – The study draws on two theoretical frameworks to develop the model, namely structural contingency theory and the interaction approach. More specifically, the conceptual framework uses three groups of variables to explain interpersonal conflict: structural, individual, and communication. Importantly, the study developed and tested nine hypotheses. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the validity of the measures while OLS regression was used in testing the hypotheses. The data were collected from 200 sales managers in the UK and Australia.Findings – Overall, the study finds that there was a surprisingly low level of interpersonal conflict between market...

Personal characteristics, trust, conflict, and effectiveness in marketing/sales working relationships

Purpose – The key objective of this research is to test how two trust dimensions (cognition‐based trust and affect‐based trust) mediate the effects of three personal characteristics (psychological distance, the marketing managers sales experience, and the marketing managers relative level of formal education) on the following outcome variables: dysfunctional conflict, functional conflict, and perceived relationship effectiveness.Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the interaction approach, the paper develops a conceptual framework to better understand the nature of the working relationship between marketing managers and sales managers. In total, it develops and test 13 hypotheses. Partial least squares was used to assess the validity of the measures, and to estimate the structural model. Using a cross‐sectional design, data were collected from 101 marketing managers in Australia.Findings – The hypothesized model has high explanatory power and it was found that both trust dimensions strongly affecte...

The Composition of Consideration and Choice Sets in Undergraduate University Choice: An Exploratory Study.

ABSTRACT We examine university choice as a case of consumer decision making and adopt a brand elimination framework. This approach is predicated on the grounds that a large amount of research in consumer behavior has shown that in markets where there are many alternative brands, consumers use phased-decision strategies. In these research studies, the consumer is conceptualized as first filtering the alternative brands using relatively simple criteria and then undertaking a more detailed analysis of the reduced sets of brands. Drawing on this research in consumer behaviour and the relevant college choice literature in the fields of education and sociology, we develop a process model of individual brand choice. The composition of the consideration and choice sets was defined in terms of the proportion of “old” and “new” universities. In order to test our model, we used a sample of undergraduate UK students who had just gone through the process of choosing a university. Overall, the results for both consideration and choice sets tend to support the view that the brands (i.e., type of university) contained in these two sets are dissimilar, i.e., independent. In order of importance, we found that the three variables of ethnic group, age, and university proximity were the most important in predicting the composition of both the consideration and choice sets.

A study of relationship effectiveness between marketing and sales managers in business markets

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a structural model of the factors that explain the level of perceived relationship effectiveness between marketing managers and sales managers.Design/methodology/approach – The model integrates trust‐based and power/influence/interdependence‐based models of relationship effectiveness. The data were collected from 113 sales managers in the UK and Australia. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the validity of the measures, while AMOS Version 4 was employed to estimate the model using structural equation modelling with observed variables.Findings – The study found, on average, that the perceived level of relationship effectiveness between sales managers and marketing managers is surprisingly high. The findings clearly demonstrate the potency of interpersonal trust (both cognition‐based and affect‐based) in building effective cross‐functional relationships (CFRs) and also show how interdependence affects both dimensions of trust and the mark...

The Determinants of Choice Set Structure in High-Technology Business Markets☆

Abstract This research explores the nature and determinants of choice set structure in high-technology business markets. Specifically, we examine the antecedents of both choice set size and the proportion of out-suppliers included in the choice set of 273 organizations that had recently made a major purchase of telecommunications or computer equipment. Our study investigates the impact on choice set structure of (1) the buyer’s past relationship with the selected vendor; (2) the degree of external technical consultant involvement; and (3) the three purchase situation variables of importance, complexity, and novelty. With the exception of importance, all variables had significant effects in explaining choice set structure. The results of our study contribute to the knowledge base relating to the literature on organizational information search in the specific area of choice set structure and the effects of consultants in high-technology business markets. The findings also have important implications for both incumbent vendors (in-suppliers) as well as new or “out-suppliers” in their efforts to win future contracts.

Communication-based influence components model

This paper discusses problems faced by planners of real-world online behavioural change interventions who must select behavioural change frameworks from a variety of competing theories and taxonomies. As a solution, this paper examines approaches that isolate the components of behavioural influence and shows how these components can be placed within an adapted communication framework to aid the design and analysis of online behavioural change interventions. Finally, using this framework, a summary of behavioural change factors are presented from an analysis of 32 online interventions.

A Model of the Effects of Technical Consultants on Organizational Learning in High-Technology Purchase Situations

Abstract Despite the fact that it is widely acknowledged that both organizational learning and the purchasing of high-technology products are important areas for study, it is surprising to find that little, if any, research has explicitly linked them together. Accordingly, the major motivation of this study is to begin to address this gap in the literature by developing a model that is based on a review of the extensive literature on organizational buying behavior, organizational information search, and organizational learning. Moreover, a key contribution of this research is to incorporate the effects that outside technical consultants are likely to have on the processes of information search and organizational learning in firms purchasing high-technology products. The inclusion of the effects of consultants is important because many scholars argue that such hired experts are likely to have a pronounced effect on organizational learning in a variety of high-technology contexts.

Can brotherhood be sold like soap...online? an online social marketing and advocacy pilot study synopsis

Having engaged one billion users by early 2006, the Internet is the worlds fastest-growing mass communications medium. As it permeates into countless lives across the planet, it offers social campaigners an opportunity to deploy interactive interventions that encourage populations to adopt healthy living, environmental protection and community development behaviours. Using a classic set of social campaigning criteria, this paper explores relationships between social campaign websites and behavioural change.