Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for organizational learning in an alliance-based context. An interaction effect of environmental turbulence on the relationship between top management attitude towards learning and organizational learning is proposed. Design/methodology/approach -The paper begins with the notion that alliances provide an opportunity for organizations to learn from one another. The paper describes three basic tenets of organizational learning. It then proposes how top management attitude will affect these. It also proposes that these relationships will be affected by the environment in which the organizations are operating. Findings -The proposed framework makes clear that, for organizational learning to take place, both top management attitude toward learning and environmental turbulence will affect the way organizational learning takes place. Practical implications -The paper proposes an important relationship between top management attitude, environmental turbulence, and organizational learning. In highly turbulent environments, even a positive top management attitude will not always help to improve organizational learning. Originality/value -The paper fills a gap in the alliance and organizational learning literature by proposing environmental effects on the relationship between top management attitude and organizational learning.
PurposeThe aim of this study is to identify the drivers that influence customer satisfaction in a business‐to‐business context.Design/methodology/approachA survey‐based field study was conducted in which 1,068 business customers of a manufacturer of hydraulic and pneumatic equipment participated. Buyers/users reported their perceptions about and satisfaction with a supplier's product‐related services.FindingsThree drivers of customer satisfaction, reliability, product‐related information, and commercial aspects, were identified. The importance of the last two drivers differed depending on the buyer's/user's primary functional area. For respondents from purchasing and management, commercial aspects were found to be more important than product‐related information. For participants from engineering, maintenance, and production, product‐related information was found to be more important than commercial aspects. The reliability driver emerged as the most important regardless of the functional association of respondents.Originality/valueThe study results elucidate the differences between drivers of customer satisfaction for the buyers/users from different functional areas of an organization.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.