Relationship marketing—establishing, developing, and maintaining successful relational exchanges—constitutes a major shift in marketing theory and practice. After conceptualizing relationship marke...

The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing

Scholars in various disciplines have considered the causes, nature, and effects of trust. Prior approaches to studying trust are considered, including characteristics of the trustor, the trustee, and the role of risk. A definition of trust and a model of its antecedents and outcomes are presented, which integrate research from multiple disciplines and differentiate trust from similar constructs. Several research propositions based on the model are presented.

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An Integrative Model Of Organizational Trust

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Most theorizing on the relationship between corporate social/environmental performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) assumes that the current evidence is too fractured or too variable to draw any generalizable conclusions. With this integrative, quantitative study, we intend to show that the mainstream claim that we have little generalizable knowledge about CSP and CFP is built on shaky grounds. Providing a methodologically more rigorous review than previous efforts, we conduct a meta-analysis of 52 studies (which represent the population of prior quantitative inquiry) yielding a total sample size of 33,878 observations. The meta-analytic findings suggest that corporate virtue in the form of social responsibility and, to a lesser extent, environmental responsibility is likely to pay off, although the operationalizations of CSP and CFP also moderate the positive association. For example, CSP appears to be more highly correlated with accounting-based measures of CFP than with market-based ...

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Corporate Social and Financial Performance: A Meta-Analysis

We investigate the relation between founding-family ownership and firm performance. We find that family ownership is both prevalent and substantial; families are present in one-third of the S&P 500 and account for 18 percent of outstanding equity. Contrary to our conjecture, we find family firms perform better than nonfamily firms. Additional analysis reveals that the relation between family holdings and firm performance is nonlinear and that when family members serve as CEO, performance is better than with outside CEOs. Overall, our results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that minority shareholders are adversely affected by family ownership, suggesting that family ownership is an effective organizational structure. FOUNDING-FAMILYOWNERSHIPAND CONTROL in public U.S. firms is commonly perceived as a less efficient, or at the very least, a less profitable ownership structure than dispersed ownership. Fama and Jensen (1983) note that combining ownership and control allows concentrated shareholders to exchange profits for private rents. Demsetz (1983) argues that such owners may choose nonpecuniary consumption and thereby draw scarce resources away from profitable projects. Shleifer and Vishny (1997) observe that the large premiums associated with superiorvoting shares or control rights provide evidence that controlling shareholders seek to extract private benefits from the firm. More generally, firms with large, undiversified owners such as founding families may forgo maximum profits because they are unable to separate their financial preferences with those of outside owners.1 Families also often limit executive management positions to family

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3094581.pdf

Founding-Family Ownership and Firm Performance: Evidence from the S&P 500

An excerpt from Management Redeemed: Debunking the fads that undermine our corporations "Reengineering is the search for new models of organizing work. Tradition counts for nothing. Reengineering is a new beginning." Michael Hammer and James Champy, 1994(1) "We must move beyond change and embrace nothing less than the literal abandonment of the conventions that brought us to this point. Eradicate 'change' from your vocabulary. Substitute 'abandonment' or 'revolution' instead." Tom Peters, 1994(2) "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1676(3) Which of the above views offers the best guide to successful management in the future? Must everything that has been done nd learned up to this point be thrown away? Has nothing useful about good management been discovered from the experiences of the great corporations that have transformed life in this century? Is there no one on whose shoulders those interested in learning about and improving the practice of management can stand? Or is it possible that there is more wisdom in Newton's 300-year-old advice than in contemporary calls for a complete revolution - can true progress come only from building on the achievements of the past? If the debate about management was being judged by what people are saying as opposed to what successful corporations are doing, the answer would be clear. Conventional management is a failure. Radical transformation is the only feasible way forward. Again, to quote from Michael Hammer and James Champy's best-seller, Reengineering the Corporation, "The alternative is for corporate America to close its doors and go out of business. The choice is that simple and that stark."(4) The ideas behind such calls for radical change are often labeled "modern management," or a "new paradigm," and are generally considered a vast improvement over traditional notions of a hierarchically organized firm with defined processes, management structures, and responsibilities. We, however, take the contrary view. In this article, we first outline the ideas behind the calls for transformation and an entirely new approach, categorizing the numerous prevailing fads into five trails that managers are being urged to follow. Second, we explain why these trails have emerged, why they have found such a ready audience, and what is wrong with them. Finally, we propose an alternative, namely professional management, an approach that builds systematically and continuously on past achievements in the best traditions of other fields where great advances have been made. Five trails The calls for radical transformation and the adoption of a new paradigm reflect a number of commonly proposed fads about modern management: simplify, cut out, cut back, eliminate. Management is being made far too complex and radical surgery is warranted. The titles of the best-selling books tell the story: Maverick: The success story behind the world's most unusual workplace,(5) about the iconoclastic South American who transforms traditional manufacturing by letting the employees decide what to do and how; Made in Japan,(6) the story of Akio Morita's successful but un-Japanese leadership of Sony; Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment,(7) which describes how quality, productivity, and employee satisfaction are achieved by delegation and empowerment. These fads can be summarized into five trails as follows: 1. Flatten the structure! Hierarchy is passe, flat is beautiful. Modern companies are like orchestras - one conductor and hundreds of players - not armies with long chains of command. Most organizations are hampered by too many levels of management between the board and the frontline employees who actually invent, make, sell, and provide services. Delayering downsizing the ranks of middle management in particular - will improve communication, lower costs, speed up decision making, and better motivate all staff to contribute. …

The Trivialization of Management

The contingency theory approach to organizational design traditionally treats underfit as producing equal performance loss as overfit, so that the effects of these misfits on performance are symmetrical. Recently, an asymmetric view has been proposed, in which underfit produces lower performance than overfit. This chapter analyzes these views. The effects of underfits and overfits on benefits and costs are distinguished. The differential effects on organizational performance of underfit and overfit are to be understood by their effects on benefit and costs. Implications are drawn for organization theory and design. For future empirical research, it is specified how to correctly identify differential performance effects of underfits and overfits. In a managerial design perspective, underfit is liable to occur in growing organizations and to rob them of some of their potential growth. While underfit will lead to an acute condition, overfit will be more chronic.

Underfits Versus Overfits in the Contingency Theory of Organizational Design: Asymmetric Effects of Misfits on Performance

Adoption of the divisional for M of organisation structure has been explained with reference to size. The present author (Donaldson 1982a) has argued against this view and asserted that strategy is a more compelling explanation theoretically and empirically. Grinyer (1982) has defended the argument from size. The present paper replies to Grinyer. It points to continuing theoretical weaknesses with size. Aspects of the defence by Grinyer are challenged. And his criticisms of the empirical research of Donaldson (1982a) are answered. Several causal models are explicated from Grinyer (1982). Fresh evidence is adduced against three out of four of them. The conclusion is that strategy is a more important cause of divisionalisation than size.

Lex Donaldson

Papers

The Trivialization of Management

Underfits Versus Overfits in the Contingency Theory of Organizational Design: Asymmetric Effects of Misfits on Performance

Divisionalisation and Size: A Reply to Grinyer:

Design Structure to Fit Strategy

Market Discipline and the Discipline of Management