Impact Of Guanxi Orientation On Opportunism Of Channel Member

As a disruptive behavior in marketing channel relationship, opportunism will not only harm the interests of channel members, hinder the achievement of the channel target, and hurt the cooperation willingness of channel members, but also affect the harmony and efficiency of the whole channel. In the context of Chinese culture,between interpersonal and inter-entrepreneurial relationships tend to follow such exchange rules:" get an inch, return a yard"?"an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth",which means one party's attitude or behavior will be affected by the other party. Similarly, in the marketing channel, will one's opportunism be affected by the attitudes or motivations of the others? As the motivations to maintain a good long term partner relationship in channels, will the "Guanxi" orientation have any effect on the opportunism of channel members?Being the crucial resource in organizations, Guanxi has a significant effect on the opportunism of channel members. There have many extant literatures focusing on opportunism, most of which, however, were written from a relationship perspective or didn't define the dimension in great detail. In view of this, the study will introduce Guanxi orientation, a social psychology concept, to the study of channel opportunism, and construct a theoretical model to discuss the following problems, including whether there are differences among the Guanxi orientation of the channel members, the function path of Guanxi orientation to opportunism behavior, and the effective strategy to solve the problems in different situations.The paper consists of six chapters:In chapter1, a brief introsuction will be given, which mainly includes the elaborations of research background, the purpose, the content, the value, and the description of technical route, research methods and innovations. In chapter2,the paper reviews literatures about Guanxi orientation, relationship commitment, opportunistic behavior, contractual/relational governance, and consequently finds out the starting point of this study.In chapter3, Based on the social exchange theory, the symbolic interaction theory, the Chinese Guanxi theory and the "motivation-behavior-intention" theory, the research constructs the theoretical model and propose several research hypothesis.In chapter4, the paper describes the process of research design and survey methods in detail, including how to design the questionnaire design, how to measure the variables, and how to collect and analyze data.In chapter5, the paper tests:(1) the impact of "Guanxi" orientation on opportunism;(2) the affecting path of Guanxi orientation-commitment-opportunism;(3) the inhibition of the contract governance and the relational governance on opportunism, all of which constitute the main contents of the theoretical model.In chapter6, the conclusion and prospect. It highly refines and elaborates the research conclusion and discusses the managerial implications, The limitations and future research directions are also reported.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1) Guanxi orientation is a pivotal factor affecting opportunism, there are differences between the impacts of the two kinds of Guanxi orientations, which means that emotional favor-seeking guanxi orientation has a significant negative impact; meanwhile, both of instrumental favor-seeking guanxi orientation and rent-seeking guanxi have significant positive impacts on opportunism.(2) the higher the supplier's level of emotional favor-seeking guanxi orientation, more likely distributors incline to make emotional commitment; the higher instrumental favor-seeking guanxi orientation and the rent-seeking guanxi, the more likely distributors incline to make calculative commitment. Affective commitment has a significant negative impact on opportunistic behaviors, while calculative commitment has a significant positive impact.(3) The empirical results show that different governance strategies differ in inhibiting effect on opportunism. Specifically, for suppliers who have emotional favor-seeking guanxi orientation and affective commitment, the relational governance is superior to the contract governance in inhibiting opportunism; the contract governance is superior to the relational governance for suppliers who have instrumental favor-seeking guanxi orientation and calculative commitment.This research brings a concept of Guanxi orientation in framework of opportunism, which could promote the development of the opportunism theory, and enhance the understanding of channel governance strategy.The innovations in this paper are embodied in three aspects as follows:First, this study brings a concept of Guanxi orientation in the framework of opportunism of channel members, and classifies the Guanxi orientation into favor-seeking guanxi and rent-seeking guanxi, and further categorizes the favor-seeking guanxi into instrumental favor-seeking guanxi and affective favor-seeking guanxi. This classification is to expand the dimension of Guanxi orientation classified by Su and Littlefield (2001). In addition, this paper shows that different Guanxi orientations have different influences on opportunism behavior. Affective favor-seeking guanxi has negative influence on opportunism, whereas instrumental favor-seeking guanxi and rent-seeking guanxi have positive influence. The research helps enhance and expand the study of channel opportunism behavior.Second, this study discusses the influence mechanism of Guanxi orientation to opportunism based on the social exchange theory, symbolic interaction theory as well as Guanxi theory of China. The finding shows that affective favor-seeking guanxi has negative influence on opportunism through affective commitment, and instrumental favor-seeking guanxi has positive influence on opportunism through calculative commitment. This study not only reveals influence mechanism of Guanxi orientation on opportunism, but also expand the theoretical framework about opportunism'research framework.Third, the study also finds that different governance strategies, namely contract governance and relational governance, in different situation have different effects on the opportunism behavior. Previous researches have different argument over the impact of governance strategies on opportunism. This study found that the effect on restraining the opportunism behavior varies according to different governance strategies. Generally speaking, relational governance is more effective to the channel members of affective favor-seeking guanxi and affective commitment. And for the channel members of instrumental favor-seeking guanxi and calculative commitment, contract governance can effectively restrain the opportunism behavior. But both of relational and contract governance are not applicable for the channel members of rent-seeking guanxi orientation. This study has resolved such a problem as the impact effect of management strategy to opportunism behavior which has been discussed for a long time and didn't reach agreement.Several limitations of this study offer opportunities for further research. For example, this study only considers the cognition of relational orientation from one side to the other, without considering that of one only side. Thus, studies in future should consider that whether the channel members' relational orientation of both sides can be matched, and how to influence the opportunism. On the contrary, what results will be.