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This study aims to elucidate the relationship between women's participation on the board of directors and the company's financial performance in a sample of 45 Colombian companies listed on the Colombia Stock Exchange (CSE) (Bolsa de Valores de Colombia).

Using 50,214 financial records of 45 companies listed on the CSE during 2008–2016, the authors performed panel data regressions to explore the relationship between the measures of gender diversity on boards and the impact on corporate financial performance.

The authors show that the participation and presence of at least one woman on the board of directors are positively associated with firm financial performance as measured by return on equity (ROE), but not as measured by Tobin’s Q. This second indicator is positively associated with firm financial performance when there are at least three female directors on boards of 10 or more individuals.

The findings also provide evidence supporting the development of managerial and organizational mechanisms that strengthen female presence at the highest level of governance.

The study demonstrates that female presence on boards has a positive impact on firms’ financial performance, but the degree of diversity impacts differently ROE and Tobin’s Q. These findings are based on a study of an emerging economy in Latin America, and data on similar economies are scarce.

This study investigates the antecedents and outcomes of cognitive trust during the expansion phase in buyer–supplier relationships. It takes a global approach and examines cultural nuances between developed nation and emerging market firms by including participants from the United States, China, and Brazil. The results demonstrate the importance of trust in building social capital and the central role which trust plays in shaping business relationships in all studied cultural contexts. There are similarities and differences across countries. Results support relationship marketing theory by demonstrating the importance of conflict resolution, communication frequency, and social bond in building buyer–supplier relationships in the United States, which in turn increase cooperation between partners. Results also indicate that in China, social bond plays a much greater role in building trust, which in turn increases cooperation only to the extent that it serves as a mechanism to secure committed relationships. In Brazil, results show that conflict resolution is the most important factor in building trust. It also mediates the relationship between communication frequency and trust, as well as drives cooperation positively. Overall, trust is found to influence exchange of confidential communication and increases commitment between partners in all three countries.

In a country where judicial institutions are known to be inefficient and where activists have traditionally not engaged in legal mobilization, what explains the emergence of NGO strategic litigation? The author argues that a change in the legal opportunity structure impacts how activists interact with the legal system. Comparing two states in Mexico, the author demonstrates that the introduction of private prosecution rights opened the door for activists to litigate femicide cases. The emergence of strategic litigation has helped improve compliance with international human rights law and has had a demonstration effect on how to use the law to press for accountability.

This study examines the mediating effect of normative commitment, that is, a customer's feeling of moral obligation to stay in a relationship based on the psychological feeling that it is the right thing to do. Previous studies have neglected normative commitment due to its complexity and poor fit with predominantly Western individualistic cultures.

An empirical study was conducted in the collectivist culture of Nigeria, West Africa. The unit of analysis was the business-to-business (B2B) relationship between small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their bank.

This study arrived at two key findings. First, normative commitment is insignificant in acting as the mediator of a relationship in both overall satisfaction and social bonding on advocacy. Second, overall satisfaction and social bonding are positively significant in predicting normative commitment and advocacy.

This study focussed solely on an SME's perception of their relationship with their bank and does not consider the dyadic nature of such relationships, that is, the bank's perception of this relationship.

This research demonstrates that the SME/bank relationship can be developed based on satisfaction and social bonding as background variables. Caution should be exercised for relationships developed on the basis of a moral obligatory commitment.

Regardless of a collectivist cultural setting, normative commitment was found to be ineffective in enhancing relationships in a business-oriented setting in Nigeria, contrary to emerging propositions within the literature.

Existing descriptions of trust in health care largely assume a straightforward association between a patient’s relationship with a regular provider and his or her trust in health care. I extend status characteristics theory (SCT) and social identity theory (SIT) to suggest greater variability in this association by investigating the role of social differences between patients and their regular providers. Whereas the SIT extension predicts lower trust in dissimilar than similar dyads, the predictions from the SCT extension depend on status in dissimilar dyads. Further, research examining how social differences in patient–provider dyads shape trust largely emphasizes racial differences, but the theories implicate gender differences too.

I analyze a longitudinal dataset of patient–provider dyads offering a conservative test of the extensions.

Results generally support predictions from the SCT extension. Specifically, patients’ status based on differences in either race or gender: (1) is inversely related to their trust in health care and (2) influences the resiliency of their trust, whereby the degree health care met prior expectations matters less (more) for the trust of low (high) status patients than equal status patients.

When patients and providers differ on both race and gender, findings sometimes depart from predictions. This indicates differences in two social categories is a unique situation where the contributions of each category are distinct from that of the other.

This research extends SCT to explain greater variability in the connection between patient–provider dyads and trust in health care, while also showing how gender compares to race.

Understanding how managers in position of leadership experience culture is essential to avoid instability and poor performance in international strategic alliances. This study tests the proposition that national culture, top management team culture, and manager's personality influence leadership and shapes intercultural fit through the predominant management style in US‐Mexican strategic alliances.

Strategic leadership and personality theories constitute the framework for this study. Managers from the US‐Mexican strategic alliances which partners hold an equity position were surveyed and provided data to test the hypotheses.

Findings show that American and Mexican managers construct their own social reality with rules and norms bounded primarily by the existing organizational culture in the alliance. Both managers' management styles are similar and converge into a participative “consultative” style emerging as a “third culture” characterized by task innovation and emotional concern as American managers' input and task support and social relationships as Mexican managers' contribution. This study suggests that if adequately balanced, individualism‐collectivism is a source of intercultural fit while building shared leadership.

Managers of international alliances may reconfigure individual and cultural orientations and styles of alliance partners in the design of management teams to build high levels of social effectiveness. The innovator style of American managers supports the dynamics of change for the alliance to advance while the adaptor style of Mexican managers builds stability, order, and maintains group cohesion and cooperation.

Intercultural fit in international strategic alliances is achieved through designing organizational cultures that incorporate partners' cognitive diversity into the relationship.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of relational bonding on intention and loyalty and the mediating role of commitment foci in the service context.

The study used a cross-sectional and quantitative mail survey approach. Bank customers in New Zealand were surveyed, and multiple analytical techniques were used to measure the relationships between consumer bonding, commitment foci and loyalty behavioral intentions and the mediating role of commitment foci in service relationships.

The results confirm that commitment foci or targets of commitment are important mediators in the relationships between bonding and loyalty-related behavioral intentions. The findings provide new theoretical knowledge about the mediating effect of the commitment foci in service relationships and significantly enhance knowledge about consumers’ intention and loyalty.

The research provides several noteworthy insights into the role of social and structural bonding in consumers’ commitment and loyalty in the service context, as well as provides an important implication for segmentation.

The study contributes to the service research on consumers’ intention and loyalty behavior toward the commitment foci. Introducing the role of commitment foci as a mediating mechanism within the context of a service encounter is new in the services marketing literature. This study provides a better understanding of consumers’ perceptions of and behaviors toward the commitment foci, as well as their intention and loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a proposed six‐construct theoretical model of factors influencing successful cooperative relationships and strategy development.

A theoretical model of strategy development and cooperative relationships was tested. Qualitative research among key experts identified 15 successful regional tourism networks. Two successful cooperative networks were selected based on annual revenues. A sample of 254 small and medium‐sized members were surveyed from the two networks in Northern Minnesota, USA.

Strong support was obtained for the proposed model. Hypothesized relationships were tested and the findings were consistent with previous research. Long‐term orientation has a positive effect on friendship, loyalty, trust and commitment. Friendship is related to loyalty and commitment, and loyalty is related to trust. Ultimately, trust and commitment engender successful cooperation. The model can be used as a guide to strategy development at different levels in an organization.

Large firms select between higher and lower order functional strategies. Small and medium‐sized firms sometimes address commitment and cooperative strategies through shared goals and decisions in order pursue higher order strategies. This paper research supports a greater emphasis on establishing relationships using loyalty, trust and commitment to develop successful higher order strategies. However, relationships based on friendship also can be an important consideration in strategy development.

Strategic implications for developing relationships that can be used as a planning component of hierarchical strategies.

The paper maintains that loyalty is more important than friendship in developing successful strategies based on cooperation.

This study aims to investigate trade credit as a financing source among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), particularly the influence of short-term debt, long-term debt and profitability on the use of such credit.

Ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed-effects and generalized method of moments (GMM) system models were used to analyze a large cross-sectional panel data set of 15,897 Swedish SMEs in five industry sectors for the 2009-2012 period.

The study provides empirical evidence that long-term debt and profitability each significantly and negatively influence trade credit (i.e. accounts payable) and that short-term debt positively influences trade credit. Notably, while trade credit seems to complement other short-term debt, it replaces long-term debt. Moreover, firm size in terms of sales is positively related and firm age is negatively related to accounts payable. Industry affiliation is another significant explanatory variable.

The results provide debt holders, potential investors, policymakers and academic researchers with insights into the relationship between trade credit demand, on the one hand, and external financing (i.e. short- and long-term debt) and internal retained earnings (i.e. profit), on the other. From a manager’s perspective, the findings may be important for decision-making regarding trade credit use.

When investigating trade credit determinants, the literature has seldom distinguished between short- and long-term debt and considered that they may influence the use of trade credit in different ways. The present study adds to the literature by using OLS, fixed-effects and GMM system models to analyze a large cross-sectoral sample in a high-tax country where both bank loans and trade credit are considered important financing instruments.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive framework of strategic value encompassing several critical dimensions of value creation/delivery process amidst transactions between organizations, which outsource their work to local/global service‐providing firms.

The paper consolidates pertinent extant literature encompassing these value dimensions, into a cohesive framework of “total value orientation” (TVO) for strategic outsourcing decisions, juxtaposed with their respective antecedents/outcomes.

This research paper models the strategic outsourcing process as blending the three perspectives of shared value, respectively, outsourcing service‐provider value, client firm value, and relationship value, which converge toward manifesting into a common synergy labeled as “TVO” of the business system; thereby explaining how outsourcing has transitioned from a mere economically convenient and transaction cost optimizing‐business decision to a more strategically driven initiative based on shared governance and decision‐making.

This integrated framework of comprehensiveness value assessment helps transacting firms in determining the efficacy of an outsourcing decision. The TVO perspective can be usefully extended beyond pure dyadic transaction relationships to a network of relationships between the client firm and its business partners. Such evaluation/measurement of value of the entire business system is critical for firms and organizations to develop greater competitiveness in today's world of global collaborations.

This articulated framework captures several value dimensions into a consolidated structure that reflects the effectiveness of the relationship network between transacting entities within the business system.