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Values are very important for guiding firm's attitude, minds and behaviors. From intra-to inter-firm management, value congruence between cooperative firms is the cornerstone for relationship building. This paper focused on guanxi orientation values, popular in Chinese business context, and found the positive effect of value congruence in guanxi orientation on manufacturers' relationship specific investments (RSIs). The authors collected dyadic data, and applied polynomial regression and response surface approach in this paper. One surprising result is that manufacturer's RSIs keep high when manufacturer's guanxi orientation is low but distributor's is low. The results shed some light on the dynamic interplay between guanxi orientation and RSIs in marketing channel context.

Guanxi orientation is one of the important organizational values in China. This study examines the effect of guanxi orientation on firm's boundary spanner's behavior (manifested by interpersonal liking and interaction frequency) and its influence on inter-firm relationships in Chinese marketing channel context. Drawing on organizational culture and boundary spanner theory, a conceptual model is proposed to delineate how guanxi orientation works across organizations where inter-firm support is placed as the key mediator. Results from 342 distributors show that guanxi orientation has positive influence on interpersonal liking and interaction frequency between boundary spanners, and the manifested behaviors have direct and indirect impact on inter-firm relationship quality through interfirm support. Overall, the study research extended the extant literature from three perspectives. Firstly, this study deepens our understanding of the organizational role of guanxi orientation and its influence on boundary spanner's individual behaviors, building a bridge between intra-and inter-firm relationships. Secondly, the research findings suggest that boundary spanners can provide inter-firm support for building cooperative relationship channels. Thirdly, inter-firm support is found to be another antecedent of long-term orientation (previously trust, dependence, and performance), which provides a cost-effective way for building deeper relationship. Contributions, managerial implications, limitations, and future research are also pointed out.