How informants report about interorganizational relationships

"This dissertation applies cognitive psychology perspectives to investigate how organizational informants report about interorganizational relationships within an industrial channel of distribution. There is currently a growing interest among both practitioners and scholars in understanding the determinants of successful interorganizational relationships. However many of the variables believed to be related to successful interorganizational relationships are unobservable and the difficulty of obtaining valid measures of these latent constructs continue to challenge researchers. This difficulty is compounded when the more rigorous multiple informant methods are used. In the past, work on the quality of multiple informant reports has concentrated on measuring the variance in multiple informant reports rather than on understanding how or why this variation occurs. Since the vast majority of the empirical work investigating interorganizational relationships have used surveys for data collection, this project draws on the growing literature that has applied cognitive psychology perspectives to understand how survey respondents report about themselves and how proxy-respondents report about close others. This research extends this literature and identifies both the cognitive processes and data sources used by informants when reporting about their organization, and examines how agreement, or consensus, among multiple informant reports is related to the type of information being sought by the survey question and the similarity of the cognitive processes and data sources used by the informants. Hour-long ""thinkaloud"" interviews were conducted with 109 informants from 35 industrial manufacturing firms who answered questions asking about their firm's relationship with two of its downstream channel partners. Findings include recommendations for improving organizational surveys."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Business Administration

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Phillips, Joan M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Sudman, Seymour

• Business Administration, General
• Business Administration, Marketing
• Psychology, Industrial

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1996 Phillips, Joan M.

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

9780591200362
AAI9712407
(UMI)AAI9712407

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/19727