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This study aims to explore how the distributor orientation of manufacturing-centered small and medium-sized enterprises (MCSMEs) influences relationship building outcomes, distributor satisfaction, and channel profitability.

This study examines the moderating role of competitive intensity and coordinative culture in the association between distributor orientation and relationship building outcomes.

Empirical results from 115 MCSMEs reveal a strong positive relationship between distributor orientation and distributor satisfaction. The findings also show a positive relationship between distributor orientation and channel profitability. Furthermore, although competitive intensity strengthens the positive relationship between distributor orientation and the two relationship building outcomes, coordinative intensity weakens the positive relationship between distributor orientation and the two relationship outcomes.

Managerial implications and future research opportunities were discussed.

The research contributes to the literature on the management of small and medium-sized enterprises and offers practical implications for manufacturers and distribution channel managers.

The paper proposes a model aiming at the explanation of the formation of coordinative knowledge practices in distributed work. Findings from a pilot study aiming at the preliminary testing of the model are presented and discussed.

The explanatory model was developed by combining concepts and findings developed in studies of social capital, knowledge sharing and computer supported cooperative work. The empirical data were gathered in 2007‐2008 in a multi‐unit Finnish chemical company production site. The methods used were structured observation of work processes, semi‐structured interviews and a web‐based questionnaire.

The model suggested that coordinative knowledge practices are shaped by four major factors: work coupling, social capital, spatio‐temporality and affordances of collaboration technologies. The empirical study showed that these concepts can be successfully applied in empirical research to better understand and support the development of coordinative knowledge practices.

The findings can be utilized in the analysis and assessment of coordinative knowledge practices between distributed work groups in multi‐unit organizations. The findings can also be used in the development of solutions for knowledge sharing and communication in distributed work organizations and communities.

The model developed provides a novel perspective for the study of knowledge practices in the context of distributed group work. The model proposes that varying degrees in work coupling intensity, social capital, spatio‐temporality and affordances of collaborative technologies explain the emergence of coordinative knowledge practices. The study shows how coordinative knowledge practices can be studied empirically. The empirical study resulted in a typology of coordinative knowledge practices.

Complex clinical situations, involving multiple medical specialists, create potential for tension or lack of clarity over leadership roles and may result in miscommunication, errors and poor patient outcomes. Even though copresence has been shown to overcome some differences among team members, the coordination literature provides little guidance on the relationship between coordination and leadership in highly specialized health settings. The purpose of this paper is to determine how different specialties involved in critical medical situations perceive the role of a leader and its contribution to effective crisis management, to better define leadership and improve interdisciplinary leadership and education.

A qualitative study was conducted featuring purposively sampled, semi-structured interviews with 27 physicians, from three different specialties involved in crisis resource management in pediatric centers across Canada: Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Otolaryngology and Anesthesia. A total of three researchers independently organized participant responses into categories. The categories were further refined into conceptual themes through iterative negotiation among the researchers.

Relatively “structured” (predictable) cases were amenable to concrete distributed leadership – the performance by micro-teams of specialized tasks with relative independence from each other. In contrast, relatively “unstructured” (unpredictable) cases required higher-level coordinative leadership – the overall management of the context and allocations of priorities by a designated individual.

Crisis medicine relies on designated leadership over highly differentiated personnel and unpredictable events. This challenges the notion of organic coordination and upholds the validity of a concept of leadership for crisis medicine that is not reducible to simple coordination. The intersection of predictability of cases with types of leadership can be incorporated into medical simulation training to develop non-technical skills crisis management and adaptive leaderships skills.

Based on the strategy and new institutional economic literature, this study aims to explore how different levels of supplier concentration (SC) will be characterized by differences in switching cost and coordinated adaptation in an ecosystem, thereby shaping its research and development (R&D) intensity, innovation performance and innovation efficiency.

This study adopted a set of panel data of Chinese listed firms in the Growth Enterprise Board and their top five suppliers from 2012 to 2016. A Tobit model is used to test the hypotheses.

The study finds that SC has an inverted U-shape effect on R&D intensity. This finding implies that firms are more likely to invest in R&D when SC is intermediate level. While it has a U-shape relationship between SC and innovation output, both lower SC and higher SC are more efficient in innovation because of their advantage in low switching cost and better coordinative adaptability, respectively.

The study complements the innovation ecosystem literature by using SC to represent the structure of the interdependence between firms and suppliers in an ecosystem, then examining the correlation between SC and firms’ innovation investment and output, respectively. Second, combining strategy and new institutional economic literature, the non-linear effects of SC on firms’ innovation are found.

We argue for a broadened approach to brokerage by distinguishing between brokerage emphasizing a particular structural pattern in which two otherwise disconnected alters are connected through a third party (“brokerage structure”) and the social behavior of third parties (“brokerage process”). We explore a processual view of brokerage by examining three fundamental strategic orientations toward brokerage: conduit, tertius gaudens, and tertius iungens that occur in many different forms and combinations. This processual view is especially relevant in increasingly complex and dynamic environments where brokerage behavior is highly varied, intense, and purposeful, and has theoretical implications for studying multiplexity, heterogeneity, and brokerage intensity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of common ownership on corporate innovation, including innovation input, innovation output and postgrant patents.

This paper uses the ordinary least square model and the difference-in-differences technique to evaluate the effect of institutional interlocking shareholdings on the life cycle of corporate innovation.

The results show that common ownership impedes innovation measured by patent grants and citations through reduced R&D expenditures. However, common ownership protects postgrant patents by lowering the likelihood that a co-owned firm gets involved in patent litigation and by accelerating the settlement of lawsuits between co-owned firms.

From a regulatory perspective, common ownership in younger firms that rely heavily on R&D investment to produce innovation outputs is detrimental and needs to be regulated. However, common ownership in mature firms, which hold a big pool of patents or rely on acquiring patents to compete, is of less concern because of the protective role detected.

The paper provides a first comprehensive look into how same-industry common ownership affects innovation input, innovation output and postgrant patents. The research also reconciles the anticompetitive effect and the coordinative effect of common ownership documented in the literature.

Incivility is widespread in the workplace and has been shown to have significant affective and behavioral consequences. However, the authors still have a limited understanding as to whether, how and when discrete incivility events impact team performance. Adopting a resource depletion perspective and focusing on the cognitive implications of such events, the authors introduce a multi-level model linking the adverse effects of such events on team members’ working memory – the “workbench” of the cognitive system where most planning, analyses, and management of goals occur – to team effectiveness. The model which the authors develop proposes that that uncivil interpersonal behavior in general, and rudeness – a central manifestation of incivility – in particular, may place a significant drain on individuals’ working memory capacity, affecting team effectiveness via its effects on individual performance and coordination-related team emergent states and action-phase processes. In the context of this model, the authors offer an overarching framework for making sense of disparate findings regarding how, why and when incivility affects performance outcomes at multiple levels. More specifically, the authors use this framework to: (a) suggest how individual-level cognitive impairment and weakened coordinative team processes may mediate these incivility-based effects, and (b) explain how event, context, and individual difference factors moderators may attenuate or exacerbate these cognition-mediated effects.

Although service research typically asserts that institutions coordinate actors’ value creation processes, institutions and resources are not necessarily transparent, aligned, or pre-existing. This paper aims to develop a more granular perspective on how actors coordinate for value.

Drawing on the established concepts of signaling and screening theory, this paper adopts a service marketing perspective to explore how independent heterogeneous actors coordinate for value creation at the individual level. Illustrative cases of corporate startup collaborations are presented in support of the proposed conceptual framework.

Actors share and acquire information through signaling and screening activities in a coordinative dialogue with other actors. These resource integration activities (for resource creation and matching) affect actors’ valuations and future actions.

The one-sided explanations of coordination in the existing literature reflect the dominance of the institutional theory. By contrast, the proposed agency-oriented perspective based on the integration of signaling and screening functions offers a more granular conceptualization of the resource integration process. As well as capturing how actors use coordinating dialogue to match resources and institutions, this account also shows that matching is a core element of resource integration rather than an antecedent. The findings indicate paths for future research that focus on the actor.

The purpose of this paper is to compare similarities and differences in perceived quality of business relationships in Norway and Sweden.

The Norwegian and Swedish sampling frames consisted of 600 small‐ and medium‐sized firms in each country. A response rate of 36.5 percent was achieved in Norway and 21 percent in Sweden. Leading executives from both countries were used as key informants because they are the primary decision‐makers most knowledgeable about their firm's interactions with suppliers.

The findings indicate that there are a series of significant differences and associations between the perceived quality of business relationships in small and medium‐sized firms in Norway and Sweden, though both countries resemble each other in both socio‐economic indicators and cultural dimensions.

One suggestion for further research is to replicate the study in other industries, business relationships, and countries. Another is to undertake a longitudinal approach of the focal areas of “perceived quality” and “supplier criteria”.

This study is of managerial interest, as the framework may be applied by firms to monitor and evaluate ongoing supplier relationships and, in extension, their current customer relationships. It would be of interest to see if similarities exist amongst other cultures of the focal areas, and/or if there are differences across other countries that are decidedly different from those in Norway and Sweden.

This paper makes a contribution to inter‐organizational theory since it outlines a conceptual framework of focal areas of “perceived quality” and “supplier criteria” for examining business relationships across industries and countries for the benefit of other researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a RELQUAL‐construct and to test its impact on satisfaction in Norwegian business relationships.

This study is based upon a survey and random sample of small and medium‐sized companies in Norway. Initially, respondents were contacted by phone and a total of 581 surveys were mailed. A total of 212 surveys were returned, a response rate of 36.5 percent.

Two principal findings are: business relationships characterized by commitment/continuity and coordination/cooperation indicate a higher degree of a company's perceived satisfaction of the supplier; and business relationships characterized by opportunism/distrust and dependence indicate a lower degree of a company's perceived satisfaction of the supplier.

The RELQUAL‐construct and its impact on satisfaction in business relationships appears to be accurate for those Norwegian business relationships studied, but only further work in examining other companies will verify its universal applicability if it is to be seen as a valid and reliable measurement for other companies' business relationships too. Suggestions for further research are provided.

This study is of managerial interest to executives since it provides a framework of dimensions to be considered in corporate efforts in maintaining satisfactory levels of relationship quality in business relationships.

The RELQUAL‐construct makes a contribution to theory since it proposes a higher order‐construct and measurement instrument for the benefit of other researchers and practitioners in the field.