As teams become increasingly common for organizations to accomplish key objectives, improving team performance is a critical challenge for both practitioners and researchers. As researchers have converged on the notion that team performance is strongly influenced by subgroups, scholars have begun to explore how perception of subgroups influence team performance. Thus, in this study, we examined how perceived subgroups influenced the team transactive memory system (TMS), and hence team performance. We also proposed the moderating role of guanxi perception on the relationship between perceived subgroups and TMS. Utilizing two-wave multi-source data from 87 working teams in a Chinese central government-owned corporation, and based on multiple (moderator) hierarchical regression analyses, our results demonstrated that perceived subgroups were a negative predictor of TMS and team performance, and TMS mediated the negative relationship between perceived subgroups and team performance. That is, perceived subgroups inhibited team performance by blocking the development of a robust TMS. In addition, guanxi perception acted as a positive moderator, mitigating the negative relationship between perceived subgroups and TMS. Furthermore, the moderated mediation analysis of the integrative model revealed that the indirect effect of perceived subgroups on team performance via TMS was contingent on guanxi perception. Overall, our findings identified the pivotal role of perceived subgroups, TMS, and guanxi perception in working teams in the Chinese context.

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this study, we consider a two-echelon supply chain, where two capital constrained suppliers compete to sell their products through a common retailer. The retailer may provide advance payment to one or two suppliers. We show that whether the retailer considers merging with only one supplier depends upon the revenue sharing ratio and the additional administrative costs of the revenue sharing contract. Meanwhile, the supplier who drops out of the market may adopt a hybrid financing scheme by combining bank credit with equity financing to return to the market. We find that the deselected supplier can be allowed to participate in the market when the bank loans ratio is below a certain threshold. We further investigate the impact of the bank loans ratio and competition intensity on the players' decisions and profits. In addition, we find that there exists an optimal bank loans ratio for the deselected supplier. Specifically, it is optimal for the deselected supplier to adopt pure bank credit if the production cost is sufficiently low.</p>

Associated with the sharing economy, collaborative consumption behaviors often take place among customers. Different from the traditional consumption that customers purchase the product and own it, in the sharing economy, customers can access the product only for a particular period and the ownership of the product also belongs to the firm. In this paper, we develop a theoretical analysis model, and investigate the intrinsic connection between collaborative consumption and the sharing channel strategy. Adopting the sharing channel strategy, the firm has a chance to expand the market demand and improve its profit. In addition, we examine the impacts of other influential factors on a firm’s decisions, such as the unit product cost, surplus-value, and service capability coefficient.

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