Using influence strategies to reduce marketing channel opportunism: The moderating effect of relational norms
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Using influence strategies to reduce marketing channel opportunism: The moderating effect of relational norms James R. Brown & Stephan Grzeskowiak & Chekitan S. Dev
Published online: 10 September 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract In an empirical study of the North American lodging industry, we investigate the efficacy of influence strategies for managing opportunism in marketing channels. We posit that the effects of influence strategies upon opportunism are moderated by the extent to which relational norms characterize the channel exchange. The results support this moderating effect. In particular, we find that relational norms have an asymmetrical effect across coercive and noncoercive influence strategies. With high relational norms in the relationship, a channel member’s use of noncoercive influence strongly limits partner opportunism whereas the use of coercive influence exacerbates partner opportunism. In contrast, noncoercive influence intensifies and coercive influence mitigates partner opportunism under conditions of low relational norms. These findings offer first insights for curbing opportunism in marketing channel relationships with the simultaneous use of different socialization mechanisms. Keywords Opportunism . Coercive influence . Noncoercive influence . Relational norms
The authors acknowledge support for this study from the summer research program of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration and the two hotel companies we studied and thank Reed Fisher for help with the data collection. J. R. Brown College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506-6025, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Grzeskowiak (*) Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. S. Dev School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-6901, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Market Lett (2009) 20:139–154
1 Introduction Managing opportunism has been a topic of increased interest to marketing channel scholars since the 1980s. Opportunism occurs when a channel firm engages in guileful behavior, such as lying, stealing, and cheating, to advance its self-interests at the expense of its partner (cf. Wathne and Heide 2000). Channel members who use socialization as a means for managing opportunism (Wathne and Heide 2000) focus on promoting goal convergence within the channel through the exchange of persuasive information (Frazier and Summers 1984; Mohr and Nevin 1990). Much attention has been directed at the role of alternative means of communication, or influence strategies, for reaching key socialization outcomes such as reduced channel conflict (Frazier and Rody 1991; Frazier et al. 1989), channel member satisfaction (Frazier and Summers 1986; Frazier et al. 1989), and loyalty (Frazier and Summers 1986). However, little is known about the effectiveness of influence strategies to hedge against the partner’s opportunistic behavior from either an empirical or theoretical standpoint
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