Essays on supplier responsiveness and buyer firm value - Nyenrode ...

Jaowrski and Kohli (1993) provided an intra-organizational perspective on
supplier or seller responsiveness and managerial risk perceptions. Numerous other studies
have reflected their findings. However, to our knowledge, few studies examine supplier
responsiveness and inter-organizational risk (Baker, Simpson, & Siguaw, 1999). For
instance, Baker et al. (1999) focused on positive relational indicators, but did not focus
specifically on IdRR. To the best of our knowledge, aside from the Chapter 2 and Chapter
3 studies, only our current study solely examines the influence of supplier responsiveness
on IdRR in the context of publically listed firms. The Chapter 2 sample was a mixture of
publically and privately held companies. Normally, publically and privately listed firms
differ on a number of issues, including corporate accountability, risk averseness, and
innovativeness. Therefore, the contribution of our current study is that it provides
evidence that publically listed firms have the mediator of IdRR in supplier responsiveness
and performance linkage. This means that being a publically listed firm does not reduce
the importance of supplier responsiveness in insulating it from IdRR. However, this
effect is stronger in the model in Chapter 2. Hence, we believe that privately listed firms
are more susceptible to the actions of their strategic suppliers because of their smaller
size and limited resources.
IdRR to supplier brand value. The hypothesis examines the influence of IdRR on
supplier brand value. Prior research has indicated that B2B brands help customers
evaluate whether a brand choice reduces their perceived organizational risk (Baker et al.,
1999). In a way, our results are similar to Mudambi, Doyle, & Wong, (1997) contention
that risk reduction leads to greater perceived value for the suppliers' brand. But our study
offers an additional insight because risk reduction is an outcome of the process of market
orientation rather than direct branding efforts by the firm. Furthermore, in line with
Mudambi et al. (1997), we assume that this value is created because of intangible value or
benefits from the relationship. This means that idiosyncratic processes that are not visible
to the competitors serve as unique generators of value that would be difficult to replicate.
This is important because firms that are competent at creating unique brand value have
higher returns (Mudambi et al., 1997). For B2B managers, this could be a strong selling
point when they are arguing for a greater emphasis on branding in front of top
management. Compared to the study in Chapter 2, we find that the standardized
regression weight for this hypothesis is weaker in the objective model. In line with our
prior suggestion that smaller firms are more susceptible to supplier actions than larger
firms are, the effects are stronger in Chapter 2, which is based on a sample of both
publically and privately traded firms.
Supplier responsiveness to buyer satisfaction, buyer satisfaction to buyer firm
profit, supplier brand value to buyer firm profit. Our next set of hypotheses deal with the
influence of supplier responsiveness on buyer satisfaction and buyer satisfactions
influence on buyer firm profits. Supplier responsiveness results in buyer satisfaction. In
turn, we found that satisfaction did not positively influence objective firm earning data or
profits. There could be one of two explanations for these results. The first is that objective
and subjective performance data are imperfect substitutes, so the results differ. However,
we overrule this explanation because the subjective model also did not confirm this
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