A Collaborative Interest Model Of Inter-Organizational Relational Coordination And Empirical Results

Relational coordination and the relevant researches are important components of the network. The complexity of business markets, the interactions between enterprises and network, as well as the independency of enterprises, resulting from different levels of organization and the ways social constructs combine across levels means the objectivity, importance and complexity of relational coordination. The relationship and network framework of the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) group provides a means of handling this complexity. This paper proposes a collaborative interest model (CIM) of relational coordination, which partially overcomes these problems by examining the coordination process within a context that accounts for levels of organization.This research uses the structural equation modeling (SEM) to conduct analysis, while views the interaction and sharing of cooperation as two dimensions of coordination. On the basis of systematic studying recent literature, this paper proposes and examines empirically a CIM of relational coordination that embeds relational constructs within the interaction and network context developed by the IMP group. The CIM contributes to the literature by providing a theoretically sound means of examining relational coordination mechanisms that arise from the collective interests of firms in relationships. The researcher designs a scale and set up a suit of indexes to measure the relation of the firm motivation (including collective interest and self-interest), the behavior of government, the dimensions of coordination and the relationship coordination performance.The main findings are: (1) the collective interest has a significant positive impact on relationship coordination performance; (2) the sharing of cooperation has more sensitive and stronger influence on relationship coordination performance; (3) government as an environment variable can not affect relationship coordinating performance directly, it has a significant positive indirect effect on relationship coordination performance through the interaction of cooperation which is viewed as intermediate variables; (4) in the course of relationship coordination, the interactive effect between the interaction and sharing of cooperation contributes to relationship coordinating performance through synergy. Based on these findings, the research uses matrix analysis and path analysis to get the quantitative relation of the findings, which makes the results more intuitional and credible.The major contributions in this study include: (1) the behavior of government and the dimensions of coordination are involved in the model for the first time, which develops an integrated research framework, and enriches the theory of relationship coordination; (2) focusing on the impact of firm motivation, the behavior of government and the dimensions of coordination on relationship coordinating performance, and concludes some key conclusions with universal significance; (3) creatively utilizing the SEM as empirical research methods, and combined with the matrix analysis to research the relationship coordination problems.