Trust-distrust balance: trust ambivalence in Sino-Western B2B relationships

The inverted curvilinear effects of business relationships on institutional success: the moderating role of global role complexity

Purpose

Contrary to the widely held belief in the linear positive effects of business relationships (BRELs) on performance outcomes, the authors posit that the quality of a manager's BRELs with a foreign business partner has an inverted curvilinear effect on managing challenges arising out of institutional differences between two countries, which the authors define as institutional success. The authors further propose that managers' global role complexity (GRC) negatively impacts institutional success and dampens the inverted curvilinear effects of BRELs on institutional success.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed model is tested using questionnaire survey data from 186 senior Indian managers doing business with New Zealand.

Findings

The authors find significant support for the inverted curvilinear effects of BRELs and the negative effects of GRC on institutional success. They did not find significant results for the moderating role of GRC on the inverted curvilinear relationship between BRELs and institutional success. However, significant linear interactive effects of GRC and BREL are evident.

Practical implications

The key managerial implication is that managers should focus on building BRELs of appropriate quality with their overseas counterparts to keep producing relational rents. They should, however, also be sensitive to when such relational rents start to be eroded by internal and external factors and treat them as a dynamic equilibrium rather than a static one.

Originality/value

The study findings challenge the assumption of linear positive effects of BRELs within the relational view. They highlight the significance of BRELs, even for emerging economy managers doing business in advanced economies.

The influence of cronyism on entrepreneurial resource acquisition

This research focuses on how entrepreneurs utilize cronyism to acquire resources. A case study method allowed us to explore three firms in the private property development industry in China. These firms uniquely cultivated cronyism and achieved distinctly different outcomes. Our findings highlight Chinese entrepreneurs in start-up ventures and later-stage enterprises employ cronyism. The underlying rationale for using cronyism have common and heterogeneous motivations. The similarity and distinguishing rationale also apply to the impact of cronyism. We also find two contingency working mechanisms for cronyism: entrepreneurial characteristics and a staged model for cronyism. With the firm’s growth, cronyism remains important, but firms with more community involvement outperform others. This research contributes to the theory on strategic network utilization for resource acquisition during entrepreneurial development stages. We investigate how entrepreneurial strategies can assist in adapting to the “rules of the game” while utilizing resources within the set contextual constraints.

Confucian values, trust, and family farm adoption of green control techniques

Encouraging farmers to adopt green control techniques (GCTs) helps to reduce and control the use of chemical pesticides. However, there is a lack of attention regarding the promotion of culture as an informal institution. As an important part of Chinese culture, Confucian values affect the behavior and decision-making of Chinese people imperceptibly, and these values are more visceral for farmers. We apply a mediation model with categorical variables to a dataset of 443 family farms in Shandong and Henan provinces to systematically investigate the relationships among Confucian values, trust, and the family farm adoption of green control techniques. We use the conditional mixed process and two-stage least square estimation methods for instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity problems. Our findings show that Confucian values have significant positive effects on trust and the family farm adoption of GCTs. Trust has a positive effect on the family farm adoption of GCTs and a mediating effect on the relationship between Confucian values and the family farm adoption of GCTs. Therefore, Confucian values should be emphasized for creative transformation and innovative development. To strengthen the spread of Confucian culture and improve education about it, traditional folk and cultural activities should be established, Confucian self-study by family farms should be encouraged, favorable external conditions should be created, the Confucian values of family farms should be guided and cultivated, and the trust level of family farms should be enhanced to improve the efficient extension of GCTs.

The Multipurpose Application WeChat: A Review on Recent Research

With currently over one billion monthly active users, the Chinese social media and multipurpose application WeChat (, Wēixìn, micro-message) has become one of the world's most popular social media platforms. Despite its enormous number of users in Asia, WeChat is still not well known in Western countries. Against this background, the present review aims to provide the reader with a comprehensive overview on the functionality of this application, comparison with other popular applications such as Facebook/WhatsApp and previous research. Although WeChat has become an integral part of everyday life for many users, research has only recently begun to examine the impact of this development on the societal and individual levels. The present review summarizes the literature on this topic with a focus on the motives to engage in using the app and potential detrimental effects of excessive use. In the context of the growing popularity and increasing usage times of the app - in particular in Asian countries - future research seems warranted to examine systematically how social media platforms such as WeChat will affect interpersonal communication behavior, well-being, and mental health. The direct comparison of WeChat's influence on the mentioned variables compared with its competitors Facebook and WhatsApp often used in Western countries will also be of high importance.