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

more diverse comparison. China is a growing world trade power, it is a communist
nation, and it has a collectivist culture and a Confucian value system (Hofstede,
2003). These cultural differences result in different risk preferences in individual
members of society. For instance, the Chinese have a greater risk preference than
Americans, because their collectivist culture cushions them from losses. Future
researchers could investigate how firms from societies with extremely different risk
preferences react to supplier responsiveness. This would also add a new dimension to
the problem we studied as to whether cultural risk preference is a moderating factor in
the supplier responsiveness and buyer performance relationship.
In some Eurasian and Asian economies, relational practices such as Blat and
Gaunxi are an integral part of the business culture. However, in western cultures such
practices may be viewed as unethical and detrimental to the corporate interests and
reputation. Specifically, when forming strategic supplier relationships with
corporations that find such cultural practices acceptable, buyers may fear a negative
spillover on their brand reputation. Such cultural effects have been overlooked in our
current study. Further examples include questions such as: Does IdRR vary because
of national culture? Or should culture specific practices such as Blat or Guanxi be
considered a part of IdRR?
Another limitation of our current study is that we only considered perceptions.
Indeed, do perceptions reinforce objective measures across cultures? Are some
cultures more prone to be overly jubilant when it comes to redirecting earnings from
investments? Are some cultures overly pessimistic when predicting losses which may
across from strategic relationships? Do cultures influence the relative importance of
firm perception of marketing strategies such as market orientation?
Another way to improve upon our current research could be to use a
dashboard of risk metrics to neutralize cultural biases. Experts have advocated
dashboards as a means of ending managerial biases in information processing and
decision making in businesses (Hofstede, 2003). Furthermore, some managers, when
faced with an overload of data, tend to take risky shortcuts that can lead to managerial
biases (Pauwels et al., 2008). In our current study we do not cover a dashboard of
metrics and whether a dashboard of metrics is a tool for insulation for making
culturally biased evaluations in cross-national studies of supplier responsiveness and
buyer performance. Moreover, a dashboard of metrics that includes idiosyncratic
relational risk would also be worthwhile investigating, as it would lead to insights in
whether the dashboard of metrics is truly capturing the impact of market orientation
expenditure and would further expound the usefulness of IdRR as a metric.
Finally, we examined only existing relationships. It is possible that the current
study could be improved upon by examining different stages in a relationship and
examine whether the importance of market orientation and idiosyncratic risk varies
across nations and in different stages of the relationship.
3.5 Conclusions
To conclude, we explored the role of idiosyncratic relational risk and satisfaction as
mediators of supplier market orientation and customer performance relationship in
two different cultural settings. In this course, we confirmed that idiosyncratic risk
insulation was a pivotal part of a supplier buyer relationship across cultural
boundaries. Our findings suggest that suppliers pay attention to calibrating their
response mechanisms so as to reduce their strategic customer’s risk, regardless of
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