Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-2006

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Business Administration

Major Professor

Lloyd M. Rinehart

Committee Members

John T. Mentzer, Ernest R. Cadotte, Robert T. Ladd

Abstract

Influence is the way people utilize power. Inter-organizational influence occurs when businesses want to get their way with their partners. As the business environment becomes more complex, organizations within a supply chain realize that in many instances they walk a fine line between exercising their power and yet maintaining good long-term relationships. However, researchers in this area have not provided a clear picture of how to produce those results. Since different types of influence strategies exist, businesses need to recognize the consequences of each of the strategies toward the relationship. This entails recognizing the need for understanding how the target firm perceives and evaluates the influence, while recognizing that this perception and compliance are the central foci of influence. In addition, contextual factors such as culture differences and the difference in power-dependence structures have to be understood, because they can change the expected consequences of each influence strategy.

Although there is much research on interorganizational relationships in the marketing and logistics literature, none of the empirical research has integrated the indirect influence into the study (only direct influence strategies are studied) and none of the research attempts incorporated empirical research of mixed power symmetry in field study. This dissertation strives to fill this gap by understanding and explaining the phenomenon of how target firms evaluate the inter-organization influence either used directly by source firms or perceived from other target firms in the mixed power- dependence structure of the food and general chemical industry of Bangkok, Thailand.

Using the extant literature, a theoretical model was constructed and then tested through a mail survey sent to 435 practitioners. The survey data were analyzed using structural equation modeling to simultaneously test the eight hypotheses and the contention that the indirect influence strategies have a significant impact on affective relationship satisfaction as the action oriented direct communication influence strategy such as coercive, legal plea, and promise. In fact, indirect influence strategies showed a stronger impact compared to the non-action oriented direct communication influence strategies such as information exchange, recommendation, and request. The model of the single relationship satisfaction construct performs the best fit, compared to the other alternatives considering relationship satisfaction as a separate sub-construct.

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