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This study aims to explore the direct and indirect effects of sales opportunism and sales conflict as well as of non-economic and economic satisfaction in business-to-business (B2B) sales relationships. This understanding offers B2B buyers enhanced knowledge of sales business expectations towards sustainable business relationships in the future.

Through self-administered questionnaires, data were obtained from 237 sales or marketing managers/directors of small- and medium-sized companies across industries in Spain, who were randomly contacted via LinkedIn. The multivariate analysis of measurement and structural models was based on IBM SPSS Amos 27.

The study confirms that sales opportunism positively affects sales conflict. Moreover, sales opportunism is negatively associated with non-economic sales satisfaction, whereas non-economic sales satisfaction is positively associated with economic sales satisfaction. Consequently, if all associates are pleased with the relationship and the gains it can provide, a long-standing orientation can be achieved.

The study expands existing theory on seller–buyer relationships in a B2B context. It contextualises direct and indirect relationships between two antecedents (sales opportunism and sales conflict) and two postcedents (economic sales satisfaction and non-economic sales satisfaction) in sales business–buyer settings.

The study guides buyers in B2B relationships towards an improved understanding of how sales businesses perceive opportunism and conflict (as negative precursors) to impact non-economic satisfaction and how it can influence economic satisfaction.

Most studies explore B2B relationship building from the perspective of the buyer, thereby creating a shortfall in developing an understanding of all partner expectations in B2B relational intent. Moreover, the measurement of satisfaction as a multidimensional construct secured the integration of non-economic satisfaction and economic satisfaction within a single model allowing the constructs measured in this study to be holistically assessed.

Recent technological turbulence stemming from Industry 4.0 provides managerial opportunities and challenges simultaneously. In this context, the purpose of this study is to explore the role of technological opportunism on innovativeness and discover the impact of innovativeness on new products performance in international markets.

To empirically test the hypotheses, the authors have collected survey data from 237 Korean exporting firms and applied structural equation modeling.

Empirical results indicate that technological opportunism, which represents technology sensing and responding capability, has a positive and significant influence on both exploratory and exploitative innovativeness. Also, explorative and exploitative innovativeness have positive and significant effects on new product performance in international markets.

This study highlighted the importance of technology sensing and responding capabilities to capture emerging opportunities, which may arise from Industry 4.0 technologies. In addition, sensing and responding capabilities will help a firm create a culture that values innovative proclivity, and in turn, will lead to superior new product performance in international markets.

Despite extensive scholarly interest in Industry 4.0, previous studies have neglected to address the potential impact of Industry 4.0 within the domain of new product development and its performance. Also, there have been several calls from the literature to address the managerial and strategic issues surrounding the Industry 4.0 phenomenon. In this study, the authors attempted to fill the research gaps in Industry 4.0 research studies through empirical examination.

Driven by the evidence from the literature on the significance of mobile (m-)payment in economic growth and productivity and at the same time the relative dismal adoption of this service, the purpose of present paper is to elucidate the merchants’ m-payment adoption from the perspective of trust, drawing upon the game theory framework, in the Malaysian context.

An online survey consisting of 302 respondents was carried out to investigate the impact of trust and opportunism on merchants’ perceived trustworthiness using a two-staged structural equation modeling–neural network approach to determine the significance and relative importance of variables. This study also applies a game-theoretic approach to analyze the impact of trust on the relationship between merchants and m-payment service providers.

The results indicate a positive and statistically significant relationship between merchant trust, merchant opportunism and perceived trustworthiness, and a statistically significant negative relationship was found between m-payment provider opportunism and perceived trustworthiness. The findings from the prisoner’s dilemma two-player model indicate that the scenarios of mutual trust and mutual opportunism as paradigmatic of cooperation and defection produce the best and worse outcomes, respectively. An intriguing result was the positive impact of merchant opportunism on perceived trustworthiness, which indicates a very calculative orientation of merchants in m-payment contracting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first attempts to propose a game theory approach to the interaction between merchants and m-payment providers under the framework of trust and opportunism. A game theory study in the context of m-payment adoption can contribute to the theoretical literature by providing insights into the decision-making processes of merchants. By incorporating trust and opportunism into the game theory model, we can gain a better understanding of how they affect the decision-making process and overall adoption rates. The conclusions and implications provide useful insights for managers of both m-payment platforms and merchants in this relational exchange. The results of the present research can provide insights into the factors that influence merchant decisions and guide them toward suitable partnerships for successful adoption and can guide authorities for policy interventions and supporting adoption efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of clients' trust, opportunism and adaptation on contractual (non)cooperation with a mediating role of coordination in the construction industry.

A questionnaire was used to collect data from employees of the Pakistani construction industry. Smart partial least square (SmartPLS) has been used for analyzing the data of 270 respondents from construction projects.

The results of the SmartPLS indicate that (1) Trust and contract coordination positively while opportunism negatively influence contractor's contractual cooperation. (2) Contract adaptation and contract coordination positively influence the noncontractual cooperation of the contractor. (3) Moreover, contract coordination positively mediates the relationship between trust and noncontractual cooperation, but negatively mediates the relationship between opportunism and contract adaptation and noncontractual cooperation.

The findings of this research suggest several policy implications for administrative authorities, project managers and policymakers. These authorities need to focus on clients' trust, opportunism and adaptation because these factors significantly influence contract coordination and cooperation in the construction industry. Emphasizing these factors will enable project managers to gain economies of scale and mitigate project failure.

To the best of the authors’ search and knowledge, they did not find any study examining the mediating role of coordination between trust, opportunism, adaptation and cooperation in the construction industry. Hence, the present study advances their understanding in the field of project management and construction business.

Integrating transaction costs economics and task-technology fit theory, this study distinguishes two categories of social media–enabled interactions, namely task-related interactions and tie-related interactions, and explores the match between these two and firms' use of contracts in achieving safeguarding and coordinating purposes in interfirm governance.

Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, this study collaborated with a professional market research firm and collected responses from Chinese manufacturing firms in a survey. In Study 2, this study designed a scenario-based experiment and collected 239 participants from the Credamo platform.

This study categorized social media–enabled interactions into task-related interactions and tie-related interactions and conducted two studies to reveal that the safeguarding purpose of contract specificity is amplified by tie-related interactions, whereas the coordinating purpose of contract specificity is strengthened by task-related interactions.

This study assumes that firms permit and encourage the use of social media. However, some firms might prohibit the use of social media due to risk issues, or their partners may be prohibited from using social media.

Given that social media–enabled interactions have joint effects with contracts in achieving safeguarding and coordinating purposes, a firm's employees should match their goals with an appropriate type of social media–enabled interactions.

This study enriches the interfirm governance literature by uncovering the roles of these two types of interactions in matching contract specificity to achieve safeguarding and coordinating purposes, which provides actionable insights for managers in governing interfirm relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how chief executive officers’ (CEOs) narcissism impacts firm performance and how this, in turn, affects a CEO’s positive rhetorical tone.

The narcissism score is measured by using an analytical composite score for each CEO based on eight factors. The paper uses textual analysis on a sample of 848 CEO letters of US firms over the period 2010–2019. WarpPLS software, version 7.0 was used to conduct structural equation modeling through the partial least squares because a non-linear algorithm exists between CEO narcissism, firm performance and positive tone, and the values of path coefficients moved from non-significant to significant.

The results suggest that performance partially mediates the relationship between CEO narcissism and positive tone. This indicates that not all the positivity expressed by narcissistic CEOs is opportunism; some of it is indeed driven by better performance. The reported findings indicate that firm performance explains one-quarter of a CEO’s positive words, whereas some three-quarters of the positivity is driven by a narcissistic CEO (i.e. opportunism). A comparison of letters signed by highly narcissistic and less narcissistic leaders reveals that among those letters signed by highly narcissistic leaders, firm performance plays a significant mediating role between narcissistic tendencies and positive tone. However, among those with less narcissistic score, there is no evidence that performance mediates the tone and narcissism. Interestingly, both highly narcissistic and less narcissistic CEOs use positive words and optimistic expressions even when their firms perform poorly or negatively.

The results help shareholders be aware that CEOs may opportunistically use their personal characteristics and language to manipulate them. Data limitations about women CEOs were one of the reasons behind the small proportion of women CEOs in this study, making it low in generalizability.

A comprehensive review showed that none of previous studies examined the more ambiguous relationship between a CEO’s narcissist tendency, the firm’s performance, and CEO rhetorical tone. As one set of studies focused on Narcissism → Performance, and the other one on Performance → Tone, this current study completes the picture with Narcissism → Performance → Tone.

This study aims to understand what primary relationship problem mechanisms can exist in the franchise channel and how exchange partners respond to them. This study demonstrates how the franchisor’s relationship problem mechanisms (threat, contract enforcement) affect the franchisee’s negative active responses (venting, threatened withdrawal).

This study tested hypotheses through multiple regression analysis using data from 200 franchisees in Korea-based food franchise systems.

The results indicated that threat increases venting and threatened withdrawal, while contract enforcement only increases venting. Venting increases threatened withdrawal. In addition, the results indicated that the franchisor’s behavior monitoring positively moderates the relationship between relationship problem mechanisms and negative active responses.

This study helps strategically manage responses to relationship problems by categorizing ‘relationship problem mechanisms’ into intentional relationship problem mechanisms based on communication (threat) and unintentional relationship problem mechanisms based on action (contract enforcement). This study finds that both relationship problem mechanisms, intentional or unintentional, eventually cause threatened withdrawal directly or indirectly. Even if the threat is merely communication, not action, it is more likely to cause relationship dissolution than contract enforcement by directly triggering any negative active response. This study also finds that behavior monitoring can affect exchange partners through interaction with other management mechanisms rather than directly affecting them.

Transaction cost economics sees a broad spectrum of governance structures spanned by two types of economic adaptation: autonomous and cooperative. Stakeholder theorists have drawn much inspiration from transaction cost economics but have not paid explicit attention to the centrality of the idea of adaptation in this literature. This study aims to address this gap.

The authors develop a novel conceptual framework applying the distinction between the two types of economic adaptation to stakeholder theory.

The authors argue that the idea of cooperative adaptation is particularly useful for describing the firm’s collaboration with primary stakeholders in the joint value creation process. In contrast, autonomous adaptation is more relevant for firms interacting with secondary stakeholders who are not directly engaged in joint value creation and may not have formal contractual relationships with the firm. Accordingly, cooperative adaptation can be seen as vital for resolving team production problems affecting joint value creation, whereas autonomous adaptation addresses how the firm maintains legitimacy within the larger stakeholder environment.

Similar to its significance for transaction cost economics, the distinction between the two types of adaptation equips stakeholder theory with a new systematic understanding of a potentially broad spectrum of firm–stakeholder collaboration forms.

This paper aims to examine the existing literature on firms’ power through the lens of the supply chain and highlights some gaps that could be covered by future research.

This study uses a systematic framework-based review combining the insights of the antecedents, decisions and outcomes (ADO) and theories, contexts and methods (TCM) frameworks. The review was carried out using a sample of 108 articles published between 1984 and 2022 in 25 prestigious journals.

The ADO framework maps out the state of the art of the antecedents of power (i.e. sources and types of firm power), the decision to use power and the effect that exercising power over other firms may have on firm performance and the quality of inter-firm relationships. In addition, this framework highlights factors that mediate or moderate the decision to exercise power and the factors that mediate or moderate the outcomes of exercising power or power asymmetry. The TCM framework provides insights into the theories, contexts (i.e. countries, industries, level of analysis and sources of data) and methods used by the existing literature. The content analysis using the aforementioned frameworks provides the basis to elaborate propositions for future research on power in the supply chain from the perspective of gender differences.

This systematic literature review offers a comprehensive guide for researchers to understand the antecedents, decisions and outcomes of firm power in the supply chain, as well as the TCM used in the literature. The content analysis using frameworks provides a road map to investigate the proposed factors that might moderate the decision to exercise power and the outcome of exercising power or power asymmetry from the perspective of gender differences. In addition, based on content analysis, the authors make propositions about TCM that could be applied in future research.

From a practical perspective, this systematic literature review may help managers to better understand the sources and consequences of their firm’s power. This would allow managers to make better decisions when negotiating with their supply chain parties, which could potentially lead to better performance for their firms and the whole supply chain.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to conduct a comprehensive systematic literature review of the different dimensions of firms’ power in the supply chain.

This paper aims to offer a new history of management by tracing a religious dimension of scientific management. The thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success in Taylor’s native Quaker Philadelphia in the 1880s. The paper’s main contribution is to contrast the philosophical origins of Taylor’s ideas in scientific management to his native Quaker roots, and how Taylor, over time, into the 1910s, wrestled with this issue.

The paper is situated in historical interpretivism and subjectivism, leaning on contextual and narrative research on religious morality.

Quaker morality prevented managerial opportunism at Taylor’s Midvale Steel in the 1880s. Conversely, by the 1900s and 1910s, interest conflicts between workers and managers escalated when scientific management moved out of its traditional cultural contexts of Quaker Philadelphia and spread across the USA. The historical implication is, already for Taylor’s time, that scientific management never was the “one-best way” of management.

Future research needs to deepen and broaden research on scientific management when tracing the significance of religion and culture in management thought.

The paper has implications for modern studies of business morality by uncovering the practical relevance of religious business ethics at the outset of management studies.

The historic emergence of scientific management points to a theory of institutional evolution and economic growth, when religiously grounded governance of the firm deinstitutionalized, and institutional economic governance, with different but superior economic advantages, progressed by the 1900s.

The paper suggests an alternative version of the intellectual heritage of management studies by tracing the legacy of Taylor’s Quakerism and how religious and cultural ideas contributed to the formation of science in management.