Research On The Relationship Between The Use Of Channel Power And Channel Governance

Under the background of “Internet+”economy, flower-farmers and leading enterprises are faced with highly dynamic and complex marketing channel competition environment.How to improve the channel conflict between the two sides, to enhance the cooperation intention of them, and to strengthen the management and maintenance of the channel relationship is a hot issue in the field of enterprise management practice and academic innovation.Although the existing research based on the game theory of channels has studied the channel stability and the cooperation between the growers and leading enterprises and has proposes that different types of channel power will produce different results of channel governance, effective channel governance will be beneficial to curb the conflicts and maintain the relations between the two sides of channel. In addition, the existing research makes recommendations of the channel management from the perspective of explicit contracts, but does not studies the effect mechanism of channel power deeply on the term of relationship commitment and lacks of relevant empirical research. In this case, this paper focuses on the basic problem of “how to use the channel power to influence the results of the channel governance”, which is trying to open the black box of the mechanism.On the basis of reviewing the relevant theories, this paper puts forward the following three research questions: Firstly, whether the use of channel power will affect the cooperation or conflict of the channels? Secondly, the use of the two different dimensions of the channel power will have different impacts on the channel cooperation or conflict? Thirdly, whether does the relationship commitment play a regulatory role to the relationship between the use of channel power and channel governance ?In order to solve the above problems, this paper puts forward the hypothesis about the influence of channel power on channel governance. Subsequently, through the 272 questionnaires, this paper uses SPSS17.0 and AMOS17.0 to test the hypotheses and models,and finally comes to the following conclusions:(1)The use of channel power is the key factor affecting the results of channel governance. The leading enterprises can strengthen the cooperation with the flower-growers by controlling the use of the channel power, and restrain the channel conflicts to maintain the good relationship between the two sides.(2)The use of the two different dimensions of channel power has different effects on channel cooperation or conflict. Using the coercive power the more frequently, the more easily leads to channel conflict, and reduces the cooperation between the two sides; on the contrary, using the non coercive power is not only conducive to strengthen the cooperation between the two sides of the channel, but also to inhibit the generation of channel conflict.(3)The relationship commitment plays a regulatory role between the use of channel power and channel governance results. The excessive use of coercive power can reduce the willingness to cooperate, and the effect is stronger by regulating the calculative commitment and affective commitment; on the contrary, the use of non coercive power can inhibit the channel conflict, enhance the level of cooperation on both sides of the channel,and the effect through affective commitment will become stronger, however, the effect of the calculative commitment is not so significant.Overall, the innovation points of this paper are as follows:In the past, the research on the mechanism of channel governance studied the investment, trust, bilateral relations and the impacts of various environmental factors on the channel governance mechanism mainly from three perspectives such as the transaction cost theory, social exchange theory and the environment of the organization. Based on the channel relationship theory and channel behavior theory, this paper empirically studies the relationship between the use of channel power and channel governance by the perspective of relationship commitment, and constructs a more concrete theoretical model.