This research focuses on buying firms’ trust in a supplier's salesperson and posits that this type of trust is determined by characteristics of the salesperson, the interpersonal relationships between a salesperson and the buying firm's boundary personnel, and characteristics of personal interactions between these two parties. More important, the authors discuss the concept of interpersonal relationships in the context of Chinese culture and model it as a three-dimensional latent construct, which, in some literature, is called guanxi. A key aspect of this research is that the authors investigate the impact of each dimension of guanxi on salesperson trust separately. Moreover, the authors consider the buying firm's trust in the supplying firm and its long-term orientation toward the supplier the consequences of salesperson trust. To test the model, the authors use data collected from 128 buying organizations in Hong Kong. The sampled firms are from both the government and private sectors.

Purpose-1. To examine the impact of self-congruence on consumer satisfaction with services. 2. To develop and test a conceptual model of the antecedents and consequences of consumer satisfaction in the hospitality industry. Design/methodology/approach-Our conceptual framework consists of the following constructs: actual self-congruence, ideal self-congruence, desires congruence, service quality, consumers' overall attitude to a service firm, and intention to return. Moreover, we develop and test twelve hypotheses. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were used to test the validity of the measures, while PLS was used in hypotheses testing. Data were collected from 185 consumers who had recently visited a restaurant or hotel. Findings-Overall, we find strong support for eleven of the twelve hypotheses. More specifically, the findings reveal that ideal self-congruence and desires congruence have positive effects on consumer satisfaction. In contrast, we show that actual self-congruence is not related to consumer satisfaction. Moreover, we demonstrate that the two dimensions of service quality − physical quality and staff behaviour − have a positive impact on both desires congruence and consumer satisfaction. Importantly, consumer satisfaction is found to be a better indicator of the consumers' overall attitude to the service firm than service quality. Finally, the study confirms that consumer satisfaction mediates the relationship between the two service quality dimensions, ideal self-congruence, and intention to return. Originality/value-Our study makes four important contributions. First, we advance satisfaction research by integrating self-concept theory into the postpurchase evaluation of services. Second, we examine the relationship between the multidimensional nature of service quality and consumer satisfaction by testing paths from two posited dimensions of service quality − physical quality and staff behaviour-to satisfaction. Third, we integrate the consumers' overall attitude to a service firm into existing models of satisfaction and test its impact on behavioural loyalty (intention to return). Finally, we contribute to the satisfaction research literature by testing the effect of service quality on desires congruence, and the effect of desires congruence on consumer satisfaction.

To develop and test a model of the factors which explain the level of interpersonal conflict between Marketing Managers and Sales Managers. 2. To establish the overall level of interpersonal conflict in the full sample and in the two sampled countries. Design We drew on two theoretical frameworks to develop our model-structural contingency theory and the interaction approach. More specifically, our conceptual framework uses three groups of variables to explain interpersonal conflict: structural, individual, and communication. Importantly, we developed and tested nine hypotheses. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the validity of the measures while OLS regression was used in testing the hypotheses. The data was collected from 200 Sales Managers in the UK and Australia. Findings Overall, we found that there was a surprisingly low level of interpersonal conflict between MMs and SMs and that there were no differences across the two countries. Of the three groups of variables, the two communication variables-frequency and bidirectionality-had the strongest effects on interpersonal conflict. The next strongest effects were from the individual-level variables-psychological distance and the SM's formal education. The findings also reveal that the level of the SM's marketing training and the MM's sales experience had no influence on interpersonal conflict. Two of the three structural variablesuse of lateral linkages and being part of a corporation-had the hypothesized negative impact on interpersonal conflict. What is new? Ours is the first study to use a large empirical survey to examine the marketing and sales dyad. Also, ours is one of the few studies to test the effects of communication behaviours on peer manager conflict. (Houston et al., 2001), and work examining cross-functional product development teams (Sarin and Mahajan, 2001), underline the importance of this topic. Our research examines marketing's cross-functional relationship (CFR) with sales, and was chosen because it remains largely unexplored in the literature. In their summary of the sparse literature on the Marketing/Sales CFR, Dewsnap and Jobber (2000, 2002) note that the CFR is characterized by mainly negative outcomes, e.g., a lack of cohesion, distrust, dissatisfaction, and conflict. However, because this literature is mostly exclusively anecdotal, conceptual, or normative, it has not quantified these outcomes. Our research begins to fill this gap by focusing on one of these negative outcomes-interpersonal conflict. Management researchers have long recognised the importance of interpersonal conflict within organizations, and many theorists regard conflict as inevitable (Pondy, 1967). Accordingly, conflict has been studied extensively in marketing (e.g., Maltz and Kohli, 2000; Reid et al., 2004) but not in the context examined here. We draw on two theoretical frameworks to develop our modelstructural contingency theory (e.g., Pfeffer, 1982), and the interaction approach (e.g., Morgan and Hunt, 1994). Structural contingency theory posits t...

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