The Impact Of Institutional Pressures On Cross-channel Integration:the Moderating Effect Of Firm's Capabilities

With the advent of the era of informationize Omni-channel,more and more manufacturing enterprises has started the new channel strategy,which is with the different extents to integrating offline channels,online channels and mobile channels.Therefore,the situation is more and more manufacturing enterprises have adopt cross-channels integration(CCI)strategy.From the research level,domestic and foreign scholars have not only discussed the effect of CCI on customer attitudes and behavior from the customer perspective,but also discussed the impact of economic benefits on channel integration from the transaction cost perspective.In fact,when enterprises pursue economic benefits,they are restricted by institution conditions.Therefore,the enterprise could also be affected by the institutional pressures which are important antecedents when adopting CCI strategy.However,the theoretical research on the relationship between the institutional pressures and CCI is scarce.Especially,the question whether the external institutional environment will affect companies to adopt CCI strategy or not is still remained.In addition,because when enterprises are obedient institutional pressures will form the institutional isomorphic processes,and the enterprises will response to institutional pressures through a series of positive strategic behaviors.More importantly,internal factors within enterprises can also adjust the isomorphic processes.Meanwhile,during the process of CCI,the enterprise should not only link specialized channel information systems and business processes,and integrate data from customer relationship management,but also have the ability to manage the external networks.In that way,how do enterprises capabilities influence institutional isomorphism processes?These are the research questions demanding prompt solution.This article is based on the Institutional Theory and the Resource-Based View(RBV).The article examined the impact of the external institutional pressures on CCI stratrgy for the first time,and test the variance effects of enterprise capabilities on different institutional isomorphic processes.First of all,the article introduces and summarizes the existing literatures on CCI,and discuss the Institutional Theory and the Resource-Based View in detailed.And then the conceptual model of this article is put forward based on the previous literature reviews.Through theoretical derivation,the research hypotheses are raised in regard to the relationship between institutional pressures and CCI,and different moderating effects of relational governance capabilities and IT capabilities within enterprises.Besides,this article chose manufacturing enterprises as the research object,and collect 249 effective samples.Based on the collected data,using SPSS 22.0 and AMOS 18.0 statistical software to analyze the sampling data,testing the conceptual model and related research hypotheses from the empirical test approach.Finally,the main conclusions,theoretical contributions,and practical implications are discussed.And future directions are put forward based on the limitations of this article.Through the above theoretical analysis and empirical test,the main conclusions of this article are as follows:firstly,the institutional pressures which enterprises have perceived will encourage enterprises to strengthen their CCI degree,such as mimetic pressure,coercive pressure and normal pressure are all positively associated with CCI.Secondly,the enterprise's relational governance capabilities have different effects on the relationship between institutional pressures and CCI.Specifically,relational governance capabilities weaken the positive effects of mimetic pressure on CCI degree,but strengthen the positive effects of normal pressure on CCI.Thirdly,IT capabilities weaken the positive effects of mimetic pressure on CCI,but strengthen the positive effects of normal pressure on CCI.Finally,on the contrary,relational governance capabilities strengthen the positive effects of normal pressure on CCI.One possible explanation is that normal pressure of CCI indicates the universality of the CCI in the market.And the literatures related to the relational governance have been proved that the relationship behaviors,such as information sharing,flexibility and unity,provide fundamental to make the internalization and formalize into legal operation for partners.And relational governance capabilities and IT capabilities have no significant impacts on coercive isomorphism,perhaps because the collected samples came from electronic products manufacturing enterprises,these enterprises rely more on the IT capabilities to develop new products,as a result,these companies focus on product innovation and research&development,rather than a channel management innovation.These findings reveal that when enterprises are obedient institutional pressures in order to obtain the legality,its internal ability played an important role,it shows that institutional theory provides a good explanation for theoretical framework of cross-channels integration,and the resource-based view for this framework provides the boundary conditions.