خلاقیت در روابط خریدار و فروشنده : نقش دولت

This research proposes a framework for relating governance mechanisms (power, contracts, and trust) to the generation of creative approaches to business activities in buyer–seller relationships. The framework is tested with a survey of 262 purchasing agents. The results indicate that trust and contract affect the three facilitators of inter-organizational creativity: (1) knowledge-sharing routines (resources), (2) learning orientation (motivation), and (3) managerial support and open-mindedness (managerial practices). Also, the effects of trust and contract on the creativity in buyer–seller relationships are fully mediated by the above three facilitators. In particular, trust plays a more influential role in stimulating creativity. While power is not significantly associated with any of the facilitators, its overall effect on creativity is negative.

Business-to-business marketing practices and academic research are increasingly focusing on building and maintaining long-term, collaborative relationships between buyers and sellers (Kalwani and Narayandas, 1995, Narayandas and Rangan, 2004 and Ulaga and Eggert, 2006). These inter-organizational relationships span firm boundaries and provide opportunities for businesses to develop valuable, rare and non-imitable relationship-specific assets (Dyer & Singh, 1998). To harness the potential strategic advantages embedded in inter-organizational relationships, the generation of creative approaches to business activities is a critical first step. While creativity1 is the precursor for developing innovation and strategic advantage through relationships, research in marketing and management has focused on creativity in intra-firm rather than inter-organizational contexts (Amabile et al., 1996, Damanpour, 1987, Damanpour, 1991, Damanpour and Gopalakrishnan, 2001, Deshpande et al., 1993, Hurley and Hult, 1998, Kim et al., 1999, Klein and Sorra, 1996, Pennings and Jarianto, 1992 and Rogers, 1983), with only a few exceptions (Chandrashekaran et al., 1999 and Roy et al., 2004). But conditions facilitating creativity in intra- and inter-organizational contexts may differ. For example, because of the physical and psychological distance between the parties, knowledge-sharing routines might be more important for stimulating inter-organizational creativity. Over the past decades, research has examined innovation (typically with respect to commercializing new products and technologies) with greater frequency than creativity in inter-organizational relationships, particularly in inter-firm alliances (Rindfleisch and Moorman, 2001, Sampson, 2007, Sivadas and Dwyer, 2000 and Wuyts et al., 2004). Yet the factors affecting the adoption and implementation of creative ideas may differ from those that affect the generation of those ideas. For example, informal structures may be more effective at generating creative ideas, while formal structures may be more effective for implementing them. We propose that inter-organizational governance mechanisms stimulate inter-organizational creativity. As Dyer and Singh (1998, p. 669) point out, governance “plays a key role” in the creation of inter-organizational innovations “because it influences transaction costs, as well as the willingness of alliance partners to engage in value-creation initiatives.” Governance mechanisms can provide safeguards that encourage the parties in buyer–seller relationships to share proprietary knowledge and think creatively. Without the safeguards provided by governance mechanisms, the parties in relationships may be reluctant to invest in resources that produce creative ideas or approaches. They may be concerned that their firm will either not receive the rents generated by the innovation developed from a creative idea, or that the other firms will either expropriate the idea and develop the innovative assets internally or work with competitive suppliers to develop them. On the other hand, governance mechanisms are not as important in intra-firm creativity because the rents generated by creative ideas are necessarily captured by the firm. Specifically, the novel contributions of this study, relative to prior research on creativity and innovation in intra- and inter-organizational contexts, are as follows. This study: 1. focuses on creativity (the generation of creative ideas or approaches) in inter-organizational relationships (prior research has largely focused on innovation: the adoption, implementation, and diffusion of creative ideas or approaches); 2. examines the effects of governance mechanisms (norms, contracts, and power) on inter-organizational creativity as a critical issue in managing relationships between independent parties (existing research on creativity and innovations primarily investigates the impacts of governance mechanisms on intra-organizational creativity); and 3. considers three factors (resources, motivation, and managerial practices) that mediate the governance–creativity relationship (these factors, suggested by Amabile (1997), have been examined as conditions for intra-organizational creativity but not as the factors that affect inter-organizational creativity). In the theoretical framework that follows, we define inter-organizational creativity and develop hypotheses relating governance mechanisms to inter-organizational processes that affect creativity. We then describe an empirical study testing the framework and its hypotheses, report the findings, and discuss their implications for marketing theory and practice. We conclude by outlining this study's limitations and areas for future research.

Prior studies of innovation have focused on the development of innovative products and technologies within an organization or between organizations involved in an alliance. This study extends previous organizational innovation development research to examine the effects of governance mechanisms on creativity between independent buyers and sellers, parties that do not interact in formal governance structures. In addition, this research provides insights into the effects of governance mechanisms on creativity by examining the mediating effects of resources, motivation, and managerial practices. It provides and tests a framework addressing the role of governance mechanisms in encouraging investment in relation-specific assets that provide the resources, motivation, and managerial practices stimulating creativity. Besides broadening existing perspectives on inter-organizational creativity, this study also provides a new lens for examining a number of inter-organizational issues that have emerged recently, such as the generation of inter-organizational relational rents (Dyer & Singh, 1998), the dynamics of knowledge-sharing between organizations (Grant and Baden-Fuller, 2004 and Young et al., 2003), and the utilization of inter-organizational resources by focal organizations (Harrison, Hitt, Hoskisson, & Ireland, 2001). This research provides insights into the impact of a variety of inter-organizational governance mechanisms. First, the roles of trust, contract, and power in facilitating inter-organizational creativity are addressed. Both trust and contractual governance mechanisms affect the three conditions needed for creativity and ultimately increase creative ideas or approaches. However, trust has a greater total effect on innovation generation than does contract. On the other hand, power does not affect the facilitating conditions and has a negative total effect on creativity. Thus, these governance mechanisms affect creativity in inter-organizational relationships differently. In particular, trust has a stronger effect on complementary resources, learning orientation, and open-mindedness, whereas contractual governance yields a greater impact on knowledge-sharing routines and management support. Power, however, is not found to be directly related to conditions for creativity. One explanation for these results is that trust provides greater safeguards than power does in stimulating the exploration of potential capabilities.