Executive Summary
This research investigates how organizational buyers across countries differ in their normative expectations of the way a supplier—any supplier, regardless of industry, relationship, or location—should do business. These normative expectations encompass what organizational buyers perceive as standards of business conduct that transcend product/service, vendor, and industry. These expectations arise from a host of factors, including historical national experiences, institutional characteristics, cultural influences, and political and economic structures.
Using a theoretical foundation drawn from the disconfirmation paradigm, role theory, and institutional theory, the authors empirically establish the existence of differences in normative expectations of supplier performance across buyers from four countries. They conducted two studies. In the first study, they develop a scale to measure normative expectations of supplier performance, specifically, core business expectations in areas such as timeliness, turnover of key supplier contact personnel, availability, and follow-up. The items include specific numerical referents such as “75%” and “10 minutes,” which are easily translatable and relatively free of interpretive bias (as compared with terms such as “frequently” and “rarely”). The second study provides an illustrative example of these differences in a separate sample drawn from the same four countries.
The two studies produce the same pattern of results, providing strong support for normative expectations of supplier performance as a key source of between-country variation in buyers’ evaluation of supplier performance. The inclusion of such normative expectations of supplier performance has the potential to add explanatory power to models of performance evaluation in international business-to-business relationships. If differences in normative expectations of supplier performance are not accounted for, performance ratings may be distorted indicators of actual performance.
This research extends the literature on normative expectations toward uncovering cross-national differences in the way buyers expect suppliers to perform, presents a specific measure that managers can implement easily to track and compare normative expectations across countries, and contributes to the buyer–supplier literature by focusing on an antecedent of performance evaluations that originates beyond specific transactions and products/services.
Biography
Michelle D. Steward is an Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University. Her research interests are in business-to-business marketing and customer expectation management. Steward’s research has been published in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing.
Felicia N. Morgan is an Assistant Professor at the University of West Florida. Her research interests are in services marketing and customer expectation management. Morgan’s research has been published in California Management Review, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing.
Lawrence A. Crosby is the chief loyalty architect of Synovate Customer Experience. His research has been published in Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research.
Ajith Kumar is a Professor at Arizona State University. His research has been published in Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, Journal of Retailing.
Journal International Marketing, Volume 18, Number 1, March 2010
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