A Study On The Effect Of Knowledge Sharing Upon Member Relationship In Marketing Channel

Because of the furious competition, the collaboration and relationship between upstream and downstream firms become more and more important, and the competition has shifted from the traditional competition among enterprises to the competition among unions. So enterprises pay more and more attention to relationship management with their partners, and exploring the drivers of channel relationship also becomes one of the most enthusiastic research topics in academy. With the increase of marketing competition and development of information technology, the environment of enterprises has changed fundamentally. The competence advantages are more and more subject to the ability for integrating the external and internal resources instead of internal integrating, especially in allusion to the knowledge resources. Knowledge sharing plays an important role in information transfer, channels' transparency, relationship building as well as the improvement of the overall competitiveness in marketing channel. Therefore, in nowadays, when knowledge sharing and relationship management are being concerned most, a research on Knowledge sharing in marketing channels, as well as the relationship between Knowledge Sharing and Member Relationship, has a great significance for improving management level and building up a good relationship between members in marketing channel.This dissertation takes the distributor firms of communication industry as the subjects. Based on the thoroughly literature review in this field, a model of building up channel relationship through knowledge sharing is put forward. In order to make the research more comprehensive and innovative, following two core concepts of knowledge sharing and member relationship, three stages of research work are conducted.First, on the basis of literature review and depth interview, the dissertation defines the concept of knowledge sharing in marketing channel as the process of spreading and exchanging of the overt and the tacit knowledge as well as the individual and collective knowledge between the suppliers and distributors, which realizes the transfer and creation of the knowledge, improving the compatibility of the knowledge between members and enlarging the capacity of the overall knowledge in marketing channel. The dissertation further specifies four knowledge sharing dimensions: supplier's donating knowledge, distributor's learning knowledge, distributor's donating knowledge and supplier's learning knowledge. Using the data of distributors of communication industry, a reliable and valid four-dimension scale is developed. Second, based on Social Exchange Theory and Trust-Commitment Theory, the dissertation builds up a theoretical model, in which the four dimensions of knowledge sharing influence relationship commitment via relationship satisfaction and relationship trust. And then the model is tested empirically. The results indicate that relationship satisfaction and relationship trust are the most immediate antecedents of relationship commitment. Both of them influence customer loyalty directly, while relationship satisfaction also influences relationship commitment indirectly via relationship trust. The four dimensions of knowledge sharing influence relationship commitment indirectly via relationship satisfaction and trust.Finally, according to the state of channel power structure, the dissertation divides samples into two groups which represents power balance and power concentration, respectively, and examines the moderating effects of channel power to the relationship between knowledge sharing and member relationship. After testing the theoretical model in the samples of different power structures, we conclude that the model is valid in different power structures. By testing the differences of the path coefficients in different power structures, we find that from power concentration to power balance, relationship satisfaction has more and more effect on relationship trust and relationship commitment. While no matter what channel power structure is, relationship trust has a strong and positive influence on relationship commitment. At the same time, with power structure from concentration to balance, two dimensions of knowledge sharing, supplier's donating knowledge and supplier's learning knowledge, have more and more positive effect on relationship satisfaction and relationship trust.The innovations of this dissertation are: (1) Based on the literature review and depth interview, the dissertation defines the concept of knowledge sharing in marketing channels, and develops a reliable and valid multi-dimension scale using the data of distributors of communication industry. The dissertation defines and measures knowledge sharing in marketing channels firstly, which provides reference for other scholars to conduct similar studies and tools for managers to diagnose distributors' perception of knowledge sharing. (2) Based on Social Exchange Theory and Trust-Commitment Theory, the dissertation builds up and tests a model in which four dimensions of knowledge sharing influence relationship commitment via relationship satisfaction and relationship trust. The dissertation extends the studies on the drivers of relationship commitment, which provides broader perspective for the scholars to seeing about the factors that influence channel relationship in marketing channels. (3) According to the state of channel power structure, the dissertation divides samples into two groups which represents power balance and power concentration, respectively, and examines the moderating effects of power structure to the relationship between knowledge sharing and member relationship. The dissertation proves the validity of the theoretical model in different power structures, which makes the driving effect of knowledge sharing on channel relationship understood more deeply and provides reference for managers to carry out knowledge sharing and channel relationship management.