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Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
Published in: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 2/2021

13-11-2020 | Original Empirical Research

Conflict and performance in channels: a meta-analysis

Authors: Kamran Eshghi, Sourav Ray

Published in: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science | Issue 2/2021

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Abstract

Conflict between channel members is of great interest to marketers given its presumed negative impact on the channel’s business performance. In a comprehensive meta-analysis of the empirical literature spanning six decades between 1960 and 2020, we observe channel performance is indeed negatively linked to channel conflict. However, we find that this conflict–performance link has evolved significantly over time, roughly in keeping with the growth and maturing of e-commerce technologies. Further, the damage caused by conflict appears to be more pronounced for channels with international operations, and for channels with greater dependency between channel members. Additionally, businesses in North America seem to suffer the consequences of channel conflict more than others. Our results also show several study characteristics related to measurement and sampling significantly impact the empirical conflict–performance links reported in the literature. We base our conclusions on correlational analyses, two-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling (TSSEM), and meta-analytic regression analyses (MARA).
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Some include channel conflict as an outcome, but there are not enough studies with relevant variables for our purpose.
 
2
Our approach is similar to the common practice in meta-analysis studies, of employing an overlapping set of constructs with different causal orderings in a focal framework (cf. Palmatier et al. 2007).
 
3
In particular, we contacted 35 authors, and of the 27 responses received, 23 provided the required information.
 
4
Four studies were also excluded because the corresponding correlation matrices were not positive-definite. he full list of studies and details of the measures used in this study is reported in the Web Appendices A and B.
 
5
We thank the AE for suggesting this framework.
 
6
We lose some variables and degrees of freedom when parsing individual and joint performances, unfortunately.
 
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Metadata
Title
Conflict and performance in channels: a meta-analysis
Authors
Kamran Eshghi
Sourav Ray
Publication date
13-11-2020
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science / Issue 2/2021
Print ISSN: 0092-0703
Electronic ISSN: 1552-7824
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-020-00751-1

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