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Guanxi is the foundation of business success in Chinese and other Eastern cultures, but little is known about the extent to which guanxi influences brand outcomes in channel relationships. The purpose of this study is to propose a novel theoretical framework of interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi relationships in a sales channel context and how these relationships influence brand outcomes.

The authors conceptualize, develop and validate new scales measuring interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi and test the proposed model with a field study to validate the effects of guanxi on brand loyalty. The causal relationships between interpersonal guanxi and brand attitudes and affect are confirmed in a separate field experiment.

Findings show that interpersonal guanxi is antecedent to interorganizational guanxi, and these two constructs have significant and differential direct and indirect effects on brand attitudes, brand affect and brand loyalty.

New multidimensional scales measuring both interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi were developed. Both interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi are conceptualized as second-order reflective constructs measured by the reflective first-order guanxi elements of personal and firm trust, personal and firm long-term orientation, xinyong (integrity), reciprocity, interaction and face.

Relationships are a critical success factor for business operations across markets with dominant Chinese culture, like Taiwan. The intersection of a high-quality institutional environment and a traditional Chinese cultural background in Taiwan provides a unique setting for exploring different types of relational mechanisms and ensuing renqing practices (i.e. reciprocal exchange of favors with empathy). The purpose of this paper is to examine when, where and how Taiwanese high-performance organizations manage and deploy interorganizational renqing across their business relationship portfolios. Answering these questions can help build a theory of interorganizational renqing and advance interorganizational reciprocity theorization more generally.

This research is motivated by two key research questions. First is related to how renqing givers understand renqing in the context of their organizations and their interorganizational business relationship portfolios. Second, whether organizations prefer a neutral renqing balance, a renqing debt or a renqing surplus is another point of interest. The study is based on interviews with upper echelon elite informants at six high-performing Taiwanese organizations with business relationship portfolios worldwide.

It is found that interorganizational renqing is deployed as a hybrid resource, taking on the functions of both an investment and a type of insurance against risk. Two notable differences between interorganizational and interpersonal renqing are also noted. First, the social exchange norm aspect of renqing points to salient social exchange norms also in interorganizational exchanges. This confirms the importance of understanding not only the regulative and normative dimensions of business relationships, as a type of institution, but also the cognitive dimensions and underlying institutional logics. Second, this study shows that unlike at the interpersonal level, the notion of renqing debt is not common at the interorganizational level – at least not within high-performance organizations with market leader positions.

This study explores interorganizational renqing practices and their strategic deployment through the use of “accessing” and “embedding” relational mechanisms. The study also adds to the poorly understood nature of interorganizational reciprocity and provides support for developing a theory of interorganizational renqing, as a form of interorganizational reciprocity within a Chinese cultural context.

The purpose of this paper is to distinguish different types of guanxi from a historic perspective and to investigate the effects of different types of guanxi on trust between alliance partners through an empirical study.

The paper first reviews the role of guanxi in Chinese history and identifies two types of guanxi. Next, it reports an empirical study that tests the effects of these two types of guanxi on interorganizational trust through a survey among automobile parts suppliers in China.

First, this paper identifies two types of guanxi: role‐based hierarchical guanxi endorsed by Confucianism and soil‐rooted egocentric guanxi derived from daily practices of Chinese people. The ever changing social environment in Chinese history supports a spiral development model of guanxi evolution. Each of the two types of guanxi takes a dominant position in different periods of time. Second, a subsequent empirical study demonstrates that, in today's Chinese business environment, role‐based guanxi makes a more significant impact on interorganizational trust than soil‐rooted guanxi. Moreover, these two types of guanxi produce a positive synergistic effect and facilitate each other in boosting interorganizational trust.

This is the first paper that identifies and empirically tests the effects of role‐based hierarchical guanxi and soil‐rooted egocentric guanxi. More broadly, the paper highlights the importance of studying guanxi from a historic perspective. It demonstrates how a historical analysis may further the understanding of guanxi and its effect on interorganizational trust in today's business context.

This study aims to examine the effects of formal and informal institutional factors (i.e. marketization and guanxi culture) on interorganizational conflicts (IOCs) and their interaction effects.

Drawing on IOC literature and an institution-based view, the authors use a sample of 12,022 Chinese firms from the World Bank’s Investment Climate Survey. A zero-inflated negative binomial regression was used to analyze the data.

The results suggest that guanxi culture has U-shaped effects, but marketization does not negatively affect IOCs. Furthermore, a low level of marketization weakens the U-shaped effect of guanxi culture on IOCs. A moderate level of guanxi culture can enable marketization to reduce IOCs.

This study provides a better understanding of the management of IOCs. Managers should fully understand the differential effects of the institutional environment in different regions and their interactions by adopting different response strategies.

This study enriches the literature on IOCs’ antecedents and contextual factors by examining the institutions’ direct and interaction effects on IOCs.

Three types of industrial buyer-seller relational process models are available: joining theory, stage theory, and state theory. However, historically, these models have developed based on the knowledge and cultural context of the Western world. Several researchers note that national culture may have an impact on international industrial buyer-seller relationships. Including culture in the models is highly important, especially as the business environment is increasingly more global and different countries have different business cultures. The goal of this paper is to define the most suitable industrial buyer-seller relational process models for describing relationships in various contexts. The paper includes a through literature review and a single case study in order to reach this objective. A new state theory model evolved during the research. It consists of two beginning states: searching and starting; four purely middles states: constant/static, decline, growth, and troubled; and a purely end state: termination. The state of dormant/inert is both a middle state and an end state, that is, when the relational actors are not in contact does not mean that the relationship has ended, but instead, for example, new legislation may have been implemented, which requires the actors to evaluate their relationship and its future. A relationship goes through the two beginning states in the order mentioned above, but after that, any state may occur.

The emergence of “interorganizational marketing” as a hot topic leads to one key question: can interorganizational governance mechanisms (socialization, incentives, and monitoring) offered by marketing theory be applied to China, an emerging economy characterized by the Chinese guanxi relationship? The purpose of this paper is to seek to answer this question by introducing the importance of guanxi roles and by illustrating how to apply proper governance mechanisms to roles activation in Chinese business practice. The paper finds that the answer is “yes” and develops a theoretical model to show such interactions.

The paper applies interorganizational strategies to interpersonal relationships. Guanxi was categorized into three categories – family members, helpers and business partners – which meet each of the three governance mechanisms (in addition to favoring exchange as a special and typical Chinese governance mechanism) in the model.

Through ex post role activation, the paper argues that guanxi is a dynamic balance and the ways in which various governance mechanisms can set roles will lead to the roles either changing (reinforcement or dilution) or switching (helper to business partner, and vice versa). It seems futile to implement external governance mechanisms on family ties (the main category of guanxi) that have been firmly rooted in Chinese culture. On the other hand, applying the four mentioned governance mechanisms could reinforce, maintain, or dilute helper and business partner roles, or even make it possible to switch from one to another.

The paper proposes a new concept regarding relationship marketing, namely the application of governance mechanisms to interpersonal relationships, which provides people doing business in China with a new perspective for reference.

Interorganizational dependence is considered as a liability for each firm and needs to be managed properly. Rather than exploring the opportunistic outcome of dependence, the authors focus on the moderating role of supply chain boundary spanners' guanxi. This study tends to uncover the way and the conditions under which boundary spanners' guanxi influences dependence-opportunism relationships.

Using a survey of 380 buyer–supplier exchanges in China, this study first examines the relationship between dependence and opportunism, then assesses the contingent role of boundary spanners' guanxi and further tests how unfairness perception and legal inefficiency alter the role of guanxi in managing dependence.

This study finds that buyer dependence increases supplier opportunism while supplier dependence lowers supplier opportunism. Boundary spanners' guanxi weakens the opportunism-facilitating impact of buyer dependence and mitigates the opportunism-restricting effect of supplier dependence. However, unfairness perception would attenuate the value of guanxi in restricting depended sides' opportunism but strengthen the value of guanxi in motivating depending sides' opportunism; legal inefficiency would amplify the value of guanxi in facilitating depending suppliers' opportunism.

First, the study enriches supply chain dependence studies by incorporating interpersonal guanxi into the investigation of dependence-opportunism relationships. Second, the study adds to the supply chain management literature by uncovering a contrasting role of guanxi in influencing the dependence-opportunism relationship. Third, the study incorporates an agency view to uncover two boundary conditions under which guanxi is mobilized for personal interest seeking or for organizational purposes.

We conceptualize corporate social capital within the context of Chinese guanxi culture. We assert that the formation and mobilization of corporate social capital are culturally and institutionally contextualized. Building upon a relational approach to corporate performance, we examine culture-sensitive properties of Chinese guanxi and compare guanxi social capital with non-guanxi social capital. We then explain why guanxi-based corporate social capital is of growing significance to the Chinese transitional economy in an era of increasing market competition and institutional uncertainty. We conclude by proposing a research agenda about the roles that guanxi-based corporate social capital plays for boosting corporate performance.

The purpose of this study is to examine how formal contracts affect alliance innovation performance. To understand the mechanism underlying the impact, this study tests whether relationship learning mediates the impact of formal contracts on alliance innovation performance and how guanxi moderates the mediating effect.

This study is conducted with a sample of 225 manufacturers in China. This paper used hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses and used the PROCESS method to test the mediating effect of relationship learning.

Formal contracts positively affect relationship learning, which facilitates alliance innovation performance. Guanxi positively moderates the effect of formal contracts on alliance innovation performance. Relationship learning mediates the relationship between formal contracts and alliance innovation performance. Moreover, guanxi positively moderates the mediating effect.

Future research could investigate factors moderating the effect of guanxi on alliance innovation performance and moderating the effect of relationship learning on alliance innovation performance. Future research can also use secondary data to measure alliance innovation performance. Future researchers can examine how guanxi as a relational mechanism governance affects relationship learning.

Managers should conduct relationship learning in the process of alliance innovation and realize that reducing opportunism does not mean improving innovation performance. Moreover, managers should know that guanxi could contribute to alliance innovation performance with the help of formal contracts.

Prior studies have mainly focused on the fundamental requirement of governing knowledge exchange in alliances. Little is known about the mediating effect of relationship learning on the relationship between formal contracts and outcomes of innovation alliances. This study contributes to the literature by filling the gap.

Many studies have investigated dynamic positions and their importance, but there is less attention paid to how to enter more central positions. Interorganizational relationships are an important factor in network structural change. In Chinese society, firms allocate significant human, financial and material resources towards cultivating guanxi. The purpose of this study is to explore whether and how the three aspects of guanxi, namely renqing, ganqing and xinyong, can make firms more central, and to examine the mediating role of interaction.

The study used a mixed method to collect data from 256 Chinese Cops (complex product systems) firms. And, hypotheses were tested using SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 26.0.

The results indicate that renqing, ganqing and xinyong have significant positive effects on the increase in centrality, but with varying magnitudes. Additionally, the interaction was found to mediate the relationship between the three aspects of guanxi (renqing, ganqing and xinyong) and the increase in centrality.

The study provides new insights to help firms become more central by combining guanxi (renqing, ganqing and xinyong) with change in centrality, enriching the literature on network dynamics and guanxi-related research. Moreover, the study provides managers with a clear understanding of how to use guanxi to make the firm more central in situations with limited resources.