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This paper aims to investigate the roles of renqing (reciprocal favor) and ganqing (positive affect) as consequences of relationship marketing investments (three dimensions: financial, social and structural) and antecedents of customer loyalty.

A quantitative survey methodology using self-administered questionnaires has been adopted to collect data of 218 procurement staffs from the database of China Purchasing Managers’ Club. Hypotheses tests were conducted using structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that financial and social relationship marketing investments, but not structural relationship marketing investments, are crucial in evoking renqing and ganqing. The results also provide strong evidence of the relationship between renqing and ganqing, which in turn are necessary determinants of customer loyalty.

This research is among the first to examine and confirm renqing and ganqing as a mediating mechanism through which financial and social relationship marketing investments influence attitudinal loyalty, and also through attitudinal loyalty ultimately affects behavioral loyalty. Findings imply the need for Chinese firms in general, and business-to-business context in particular, to strategically lever on the key antecedents of customer loyalty including relationship marketing investments, renqing and ganqing, in pursuit of a more competitive advantage and long-term profit.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of mobile social media functions on explicit and implicit knowledge sharing under the “Guanxi” system based on the framework of stimulus–organism–response (SOR).

Combined with Guanxi theory, this paper designs an experiment to collect data from the new product development (NPD) teams.

Interestingly, the results show that the effect of social media communication function on employees is greater than the impact of collaboration on employees. Specifically, on the one hand, the more employees communicate in social media, the better their feelings will be, the less they will share knowledge. On the other hand, the collaboration function has a significantly negative impact on the psychological factors of employees. Excessively close cooperation and contact may instead create a contradiction between the employees, which is not conducive to the occurrence of knowledge sharing.

This paper extends SOR framework by combining Guanxi theory to examine the relationship between social media functions and knowledge sharing behavior (KSB). In practical, companies should pay attention to the frequency of employee using social media when it is introduced for NPD teams to control the negative influence of social media functions on employee KSB.

This article examines the differential effects of two types of trust (affect based and cognition based) and two types of feelings (ganqing and jiaoqing) on different knowledge-sharing processes (seeking, transfer, and adoption) among Chinese employees. The influences of these different types of trust and feelings on Chinese employeesʼ propensities to seek, transfer, and adopt explicit and tacit knowledge are also analyzed and discussed. The analysis shows affect-based trust increases knowledge transfer, while cognition-based trust is more important to knowledge seeking and adoption. Affect-based trust alone can facilitate the different processes of sharing explicit knowledge. Effective sharing of tacit knowledge, on the other hand, requires the simul-taneous support from affect-based trust and cognition-based trust. Ganqing and jiaoqing are also important in knowledge transfer and adoption. Either feeling may increase the likelihood to seek, transfer, and adopt explicit knowledge by itself. The influences of both feelings on tacit knowledge seeking, transfer, and adoption hinge on the presence of cognition-based trust.

This study aims to explore how a buyer's perceived buyer-seller (B-S) guanxi facets (i.e. ganqing, renqing and mianzi) and guanxi positions (i.e. zi-ji-ren, shou-ren and sheng-ren) affect the seller's influence effectiveness (SIE) and purchase intention (PI) in social commerce.

This study conducted an online survey in three cities of Taiwan and collected a total of 364 data. The structural equation modeling and cluster analysis were used to test research hypotheses.

The results indicate that (1) each guanxi facet exerts a different and positive impact on SIE, but only one guanxi facet – renqing – helps improve PI, (2) guanxi facets can be used to predict the buyer's perceived guanxi position toward the seller, (3) the effect of guanxi facets on SIE and PI varies across B-S guanxi positions and (4) the SIE positively mediates effects of guanxi facets on the PI.

This study demonstrates the individual effect of each guanxi facet on SIE and PI and affirms the implicit guanxi position features guanxi facets and determines the buyer's perceived SIE and PI as well. To the best of our knowledge, these findings are rarely proposed in previous research and are beneficial for understanding the guanxi mechanism in social commerce.

The purpose of this study is to enhance the comprehensive understanding of the roles of resource investments, explicit contracts and three components of guanxi (i.e. renqing, ganqing and mianzi) in asymmetric research and development (R&D) partnerships. Treating dependence asymmetry as a multidimensional construct, this study examines the moderating effects of these elements on the relationships between resources and information asymmetry and opportunism.

The study was executed by issuing questionnaires to R&D managers participating in R&D projects and collaborations in the Shanghai and Jiangsu provinces via e-mail and face to face surveys. A multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical test generally supported the conceptual model and produced the following findings: first, resources and information asymmetry significantly and positively affect opportunism. Second, the partner’s resource investments can weaken the effect of resources and information asymmetry on the partner’s opportunism. Third, explicit contracts can reduce the impact of information asymmetry on the partner’s opportunism. Fourth, renqing and ganqing but not mianzi can weaken the influence of information asymmetry on the partner’s opportunism.

This study provides a comprehensive and clear understanding of how opportunism can be curbed by jointly considering resource investments, explicit contracts and guanxi in asymmetric R&D cooperative relationships. Moreover, dependence asymmetry and guanxi are measured as a multidimensional construct and reveal their underlying structure, which expands previous understandings of risk management in R&D collaborations.

The implementation of sustainable supply chain management (SCM) calls for an acknowledgement of uncertainty inherent in complex environment. Confucianist society forms social networks in Confucianist society, called guanxi networks, influence economic behaviours and business practices in the workplace. The purpose of this study is to explore how these social networks influence the implementation of sustainable SCM. In doing so, this study aims to critically investigate the constructs of guanxi networks, their impact on flow of supply chain capital and how this leverages the implementation of sustainable SCM.

Two systematic literature reviews are conducted to understand the constructs of social networks in Confucianist culture and their impacts on the flow of supply chain capitals. The reviews also analyse evidence related to the economic, social and environmental practices to reveal the current state of the literature and research gaps. Propositions and a framework are developed to support future research in this area.

The constructs of ganqing, renqing, xinren and mianzi in guanxi networks have expanded the contexts of social networks in Western literature. Guanxi networks increase the flow of supply chain capital and generate trust between players, thus enhancing capabilities to implement sustainable SCM. Guanxi networks also create the mechanism of network governance with which to increase sustainable SCM implementation under the institutional logics of sustainability.

The conceptual framework and justification are based on the reviews of current studies in the field. Future empirical study is encouraged to test the propositions, both in Confucianist culture and other countries with culture of social networks.

Social networks are socially constructed concepts. The constructs of guanxi networks revealed in this study have developed the knowledge of Western-based social network theory. Besides, arguments from a social network perspective provide an alternative answer to explain increased behavioural commitment and companies’ investment in sustainable SCM. This study helps practitioners understand the logic of this social norm and to use it to maximise their operation outputs, including sustainable SCM implementation.

This study aims to explore the impacts of structural holes (SH) and guanxi and their interaction on the application and integration of tacit knowledge among co-workers in inter-organizational arrangements.

The relationships were examined using a mixed-methods research approach through 305 questionnaires and 50 interviews collected from a university and a pharmaceutical company in China.

SH hinders the application and integration of tacit knowledge, while guanxi promotes these latter. In addition, guanxi moderates the negative impact of SH on tacit knowledge application (TKA) and tacit knowledge integration (TKI).

By developing a framework to identify how co-workers strategically leverage their guanxi and SH to facilitate TKA and TKI, this study identifies the key factors that drive these latter in complex inter-organizational arrangements, contributing to the literature on knowledge management. In addition, the study makes a contribution to the advancement of SH theory by comparing guanxi with other social relationships in terms of their application to SH in different cultures, and recognizing the cultural contingencies that condition the effect of SH on knowledge management performance, thereby generating an important implication for the identification of the different roles that structural-hole owners play in brokerage situations. Finally, by comparing the difference between guanxi and interpersonal relationships in Chinese culture, this study provides a reasonable explanation for guanxi’s moderating effect on SH.

By uncovering the significance of guanxi cultivation with individuals who occupy yet-to-be-filled SH to make them more committed to the network, this study seeks to provide organizational leaders with helpful suggestions for the creation of incentives to fill SH.

By developing a framework to identify how co-workers strategically leverage their guanxi and SH to facilitate TKA and TKI, this study provides a theoretically defensible and empirically supported solution to the problems experienced by co-workers in applying and integrating tacit knowledge effectively in complex inter-organizational arrangements.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of the extant empirical body of knowledge regarding the impact of Guanxi on international Business-to-Business (B-to-B) relationships.

After the collection and refinement of studies that appeared in marketing, business and management literature during 1995-2018 period, a systematic review was conducted to discover the current situation and future research directions on the subject.

Theoretically, vast majority of the reviewed studies lacked a theoretical foundation, with the remainder anchored primarily on the resource-based view, social network theory and social exchange theory. Methodologically, Ganqing, Xinren and Mianzi are the most frequently investigated dimensions, whereas Renqing is the least investigated dimension. Data are mostly obtained from both Chinese and Western counterparts through survey and analyzed through univariate and multivariate data analysis techniques. Empirically, extant research focused on many diverse outcomes including trust, financial performance, cooperation, satisfaction, time orientation, opportunism and liability of foreignness, while under-examining the drives of Guanxi.

This study provides a synthesis of extant line of research on the subject that are published in peer-reviewed international journals, which publish research in English. A meta-analysis may be conducted for providing a further detailed framework.

This study contributes to international marketing literature by providing an in-depth and synthesized inventory of knowledge to scholars; deriving a comprehensive analysis of theoretical foundations, methodological approaches and findings addressed by scholars in the field; noticing theoretical, methodological and empirical gaps to be examined; and providing future research directions.

Recently, the popularity and growth of social media have boosted the development of social commerce (s-commerce). The purpose of this paper is to investigate consumers’ decisions in s-commerce, for which this study conducted empirical research on WeChat, a very popular social media in China, to validate how guanxi elements (e.g. ganqing, renqing and xinren) affect consumers’ decisions in s-commerce.

To examine the research model, an online survey instrument was developed to gather data. The hypotheses were tested using partial least squares modeling.

The results confirm that guanxi elements are positively related to eWOM sharing intention and social shopping intention. Moreover, these effects are mediated by a sense of belonging.

This study enhances the existing literature by introducing the concept of guanxi elements to the context of s-commerce, and linking the concept of guanxi elements and consumers’ decisions. Moreover, this study improves the theoretical and empirical understanding of guanxi elements by investigating its impact on eWOM sharing intention and social shopping intention. Third, the results confirm that guanxi elements not only influence a sense of belonging but also conjointly impacts eWOM sharing intention and social shopping intention in s-commerce.

In the recent decade, social media popularity and growth have boosted the development of social commerce (SC). This study aims to explore the significant impact of guanxi (关系) elements (ganqing 感情, renqing 人情 and xinren 信任) on online purchase intentions. Furthermore, this study investigated the moderating role of social support between electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and online purchase intentions.

An online survey was conducted on 309 consumers who had online purchasing experience through WeChat, a famous social media application in China. Structural equational modeling was used to test all hypotheses.

The results indicate that guanxi elements are positively related to eWOM, affective attitude and online purchase intentions in SC. Additionally, social support has a significant moderating role between eWOM intention and online purchase intention.

Considering the effects of guanxi elements on eWOM affective attitude and online purchase intention in Chinese SC, online retailers are advised to carefully develop their marketing strategies to retain and attract new consumers. Furthermore, online retailers can use the findings from this study to understand the consequences when online purchase intention is strongly influenced by guanxi elements.

This research extends the current literature by applying the notion of guanxi components to the sense of SC and relating the notion of guanxi components and consumer decisions. The results show an understanding of the reality by which guanxi elements may affect the intention of eWOM sharing and boost online purchase intention.