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

managers because of the insights it offers.
4.8 Limitations
The first limitation of this paper is that we do not consider the moderator of market
turbulence. Although the data were collected during the financial recession, we did not
wait for a post-recession window or sample to check whether market turbulence
influenced the customers' evaluations of responsive or market-oriented strategic
suppliers. Prior research (Grewal & Tansuhaj, 2001) has provided some evidence to
indicate that market orientation during recessions may actually exacerbate a decline in the
relationship since the suppliers' or sellers' response is based on knowledge structure built
on a market prior to the changes brought about by the recession.
The second limitation is the tradeoff we had to make between cross-sectional and
longitudinal data. Therefore, we could not shed light on the causality of the relationships.
This shortcoming could be overcome by constructing an index of respondents over a
number of years or periods (Diamantopoulos & Winklhofer, 2001). It is possible that in
future studies, further additions could be made to the model we have proposed.
The third limitation is that we do not compare IdRR on both the perceptual and
objective data levels. This shortcoming is hard to overcome because there are no readily
available objective measures for this construct. However, a composite measure could be
created by future researchers based on accounting and financial data.
The fourth limitation is that we could have added more value measurement
variables rather than only IdRR insulation. This would have provided us the opportunity
to benchmark on a dashboard and examine how IdRR insulation performs against similar
measures of value creation. This is important because a measure needs to be
benchmarked against similar measures to determine whether it is a valid indicator.
The fifth limitation is that we only had objective data on only one variable. We do
not receive any variation of the prior three hypotheses because the data are identical. In
future studies, all variables could be objective, which would give a further indication of
how well the data fit.
The sixth limitation of this paper is its research design. We use a survey, which
limits the amount of control we have over the variables. An experimental design would
have allowed us to test for a wider variety of metrics and control variables. This could
reveal whether some objective and subjective metrics do reinforce each other.
4.9 Future Directions
Although there are many possible future directions, we had to limit ourselves to
those which we felt were most important. These are listed below.
i) One course for future researchers could be to examine the role of firm
culture in accepting subjective or objective measures as valid indicators of
performance. This is important because it could also explain why
resources are misdirected because of inaccurate perceptions and their
reliability as valid measurement tools.
ii) In the current study, we used corporate-level objective indicators. Using
department-level specific metrics instead could resonate better with
managers' understanding of how much profit their departments produce.
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