边界人员角色模糊及其结果:管理控制及其与角色导向匹配的作用

Role ambiguity of boundary spanners and its impacts:The effect of fit between management control and role orientation

不同于以往研究的企业内部视角,本文聚焦于渠道关系中边界人员的角色模糊问题,实证检验了不同管理控制方式及其与边界人员角色导向的匹配对边界人员角色模糊感知的影响,同时检验了边界人员角色模糊对工作绩效和关系满意的影响。研究发现,结果控制与行为控制都会减少边界人员角色模糊。管理者的结果控制与朋友角色导向的边界人员相匹配,有利于减少角色模糊。角色模糊不利于提升边界人员的工作绩效和关系满意。在此基础上,对研究结果及理论意义进行了讨论,并给出相应的管理建议和未来研究方向。

Boundary spanners play an important role during the process of establishing,developing and maintaining the exchange relationship between firms.These boundary spanners face huge amount of uncertain factors in their daily work and inevitably suffer from the problem of role ambiguity.Role ambiguity occurs when people lack clear information about the expectations of their roles,the methods to fulfill their roles and the consequences of role performance.They cannot clearly define their working goals or the legality of a certain way to enact their roles under a specific situation.The importance of addressing role ambiguity has been recognized by marketing scholars for a long time.However,there are still many unexplored issues about this phenomenon.The existing research has mainly explored the antecedents and consequences of the role ambiguity from an intraorganizational perspective.Obviously,this perspective ignores the influence of the special position of boundary spanners in channel relationship.Engaging in various activities on the boundary of an organization,boundary spanners are key representatives of focal firms and need to play a variety of roles,such as information processing and external representation.To fulfill their roles,boundary spanners has to deal with tremendous challenges when they conduct information exchange with the external environment or try to facilitate organizational responses to environmental influences.During their transactions with external exchange partners,they may play two particular archetypes of roles,friend and businessmen.As prior research confirms that a good fit between particular relationship roles and firms’governance strategies is essential to obtain desirable governance effects,an additional stream of research is merited to explore how to adopt suitable management control mechanisms to have a good match with boundary spanners’specific roles.Different from previous studies,this research focuses on role ambiguity of boundary spanners in the context of an intreorganizational perspective.First,we examine the governance effects of different management control mechanisms on role ambiguity.We investigate whether the two types of management control,outcome control and behavior control,could reduce the role ambiguity of boundary spanners.Second,this research identifies specific matches between management control mechanism and role orientations of boundary spanners.We focus on two particular archetypes of roles—friend and businessperson—which differ systematically in their decision making patterns.To get a desirable governance effect on role ambiguity,it is necessary to examine how to achieve an appropriate match between management control mechanisms and role orientations.Third,this research also uncovers the impact of role ambiguity on job performance and relationship satisfaction.We propose that the role ambiguity is negatively related to job performance and relationship satisfaction.After confirming the list of respondents,the survey was completed by the investigators through face-to-face interview.Data were analyzed using SPSS 20.0 and AMOS 21.0.The empirical results show that both outcome control and behavior control could serve to curb role ambiguity.When managers take outcome control and boundary spanners play friend role,it helps to inhibit role ambiguity.However,when managers take behavior control,boundary spanners role orientation has no effect on their role ambiguity perception.Role ambiguity has negative impacts on the job performance and relationship satisfaction.This study enriches the marketing channel literature in the following ways.First,it extends the antecedents of role ambiguity and explores the effect of fit between management control mechanisms and role orientations.By doing so,this study answers why the control mechanism cannot always achieve desirable governance effect.Second,this study also examines the influence of role ambiguity on relationship satisfaction and job performance,which contributes to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the outcome of role ambiguity.Considering the importance of boundary spanner in marketing management,this study provides inspiration for management practice and helps managers to manage boundary spanners more efficiently,which will definitely be conducive to building a harmonious and stable exchange relationship.