| In today's dynamic business environment, organizations have moved away from singletransactions and toward entering into long-term exchanges, relating their constantly seeking ofgreater benefits with the lasting of their exchange relationships. Maintaining relationships has thusbecome a research topic of great significance in marketing.To maintain relationships is to engage in relationship management when it has evolved intothe maintenance phase. This dissertation, by employing two variables of 'Explicit Contracts' and'Normative Contracts' to indicate the way relationships are governed, identifies four distinctrelationship phases: building, development, maintenance, and dissolution, and specifies themaintenance phase as representing a situation where normative contracts primarily govern therelationship in lieu of explicit contracts. Given empirical studies in the marketing domain haveseldom been done on relationship maintenance, the purpose of this dissertation is to buildtheoretically as well as empirically a relationship-maintaining framework. The framework'sunderlying philosophy is proposed to be that by sending out commercial friendships and buildingup a friend image, the focal organization could induce favorable citizenship behaviors from itscounterparty.It is argued this framework will not only help to redress the imbalance in extant research, butcan offer useful managerial suggestions to practitioners. In realizing construction of therelationship-maintaining framework, this dissertation could have made four aspects ofcontributions as follows.First, concepts of Inter-organizational 'Commercial Friendships' and 'Friend Image' wereproposed, and a 'Commercial Friendships-Friend Image' conversion was further built up.The dissertation identified two limitations in Heide and Wathne's defining of organizationalroles:(1) business organizations' ultimate goal is to pursue economic interests, so that theyinherently play a 'businessman role', other than a 'friend role', participating in exchange activities;(2) a presumed friend role comes as a friend identity that is self-defined from the 'I' aspect by thefocal organization, so that it cannot be perceived and judged by, and thus bears no essentialmeaning to, its counterparty. To overcome limitation (1), this dissertation employed a concept of'Commercial Friendships' to capture the extent to which an organization behaves like a friend andsends friendships to its counterparty; to overcome limitation (2), this dissertation defined organizational identity form the 'me' aspect, and substituted 'Friend Image' with 'Friend role' toreflect how the focal organization is perceived and judged by its counterparty.It is proposed that if the 'businessman role' is considered as the origin point of the frame ofreference for positioning, and so as to characterize, a business organization, then the more'Commercial Friendships' an organization sends out, the farther it is away from the origin, awayfrom playing a pure business role, and vice versa. And in theory, the organization will be at theorigin should it display no friendships. Meanwhile, its counterparty, by perceiving the friendships,would judge whether, and to what extent, the organization has shown a 'Friend Image'. As such, a'Commercial Friendships-Friend Image' conversion is realized, and a distinctive perspective isbrought out by this conversion for the understanding of inter-organizational exchangerelationships.Second, with introduction of the concept of 'Psychological Contract', the extant frameworkfor analysis of inter-organizational exchange relationships was improved, and apprehension of the'Commercial Friendships-Friend Image' conversion from a framework perspective was achieved.Marketing scholars have primarily taken a relational contracts perspective to examineinter-organizational relations. Implicitly, the perspective presumes two organizations involvedwould perceive 'how to deal with the other' in an identical manner; that is,'Friend Image'obligation assumed by the focal organization and 'Friend Image' expectation of its counterpartycould converge at one point where they are completely, or almost completely, overlapped.However, organization expectations are in fact held in their psychological contracts and, therefore,they cannot be totally shared by the counterparties. As such, occurrence of a 'Friend Image'obligation-expectation discrepancy more general, which indicates that the focal organization'ssending friendships and fulfilling obligation cannot guarantee a fiend image in the eyes of itscounterparty.Recognizing the existence of psychological contracts, this dissertation maintained that a'relational contracts combined with psychological contracts' perspective would leadinter-organizational relationship research to dispose of its current too theoretical, as well asunrealistic, presumption. Accordingly, an improved framework for analysis of inter-organizationalexchange relationships was engendered. What's more,'Commercial Friendships-Friend Image'conversion of the focal organization can now find itself a position within the framework, for itsoccurrence resulted from functionality of its counterparty's psychological contracts. Third, three dimensions of Commercial Friendships were identified, and a measure of the'Commercial Friendships' concept was obtained.Three commercial friendship dimensions were extracted with a focus on information transferin the service franchising context, which included self-disclosure, closeness, and communalorientation. Self-disclosure is to reflect the extent to which a franchisee considers its franchisor asactive in transferring its proprietary information; closeness, the extent to which a franchisee sensesan intense connection between its franchisor and itself; and communal orientation, the extent towhich a franchisee perceives its franchisor as practicing reciprocity, i.e., as being concerned withits welfare. And these dimensions relate to relational contract norms that primarily governinter-organizational exchanges in the Relationship Maintenance Phase.The dissertation attempted to use them as first-order factors to reflect the second-order factor,Commercial Friendships. Structural Equation Modeling was employed to estimate the model withdata from a survey of156franchisees of real-estate agency. The results indicated the model couldhold; operationalization of 'Commercial friendships' was thus realized.Fourth, the effect of sending 'Commercial Friendships' and building the 'Friend Image' onmaintaining inter-organizational relationships was tested.A path was put forward exhibiting how commercial friendships and the friend image playtheir roles in maintaining relationships. The path suggested (1) the franchisor's commercialfriendships transfer would help itself to create a Friend Image, and would make a franchisee (itscounterparty) be more inclined to show a Friend Image, too;(2) the two types of Friend Imagewould positively influence a franchisee's perception of satisfaction;(3) and a franchisee'sperception of satisfaction would encourage it to engage actively in citizenship behaviors ofInformation Sharing_Information Comprehensibility, Information Sharing_Information Quantity,Word-of-Mouth, and Retain Intention. These behaviors are not stipulated in the explicit contractsbetween the franchisor and its franchisees, so their performance is decided voluntarily by thefranchisees, but they do have a significant effect on the franchisor's economic outcome.Partial Least Square was used to test10hypotheses accompanying the path with data from asurvey of156franchisees of real-estate agency. The results supported the effects suggested by (1)and (2), and partially supported effects suggested by (3).That is, except for Information Sharing_Information Quantity,'Commercial Friendships' and 'Friend Image' could exert a positiveinfluence on all other constructs. Overall, the results were able to justify the effect of 'Commercial Friendships-Friend Image' conversion on relationship maintenance; a relationship-maintainingframework was thus built up.
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