Assessing supplier satisfaction: Do we need to consider organizational culture?

The increasing importance of preferred customer status and supplier satisfaction unveils new opportunities to gain competitive advantages for buying firms. Relational behavior plays a major role in having satisfied suppliers, and recent findings raise the question of whether the effectiveness of relational behavior in achieving supplier satisfaction might be context-dependent. This research proposes the supplier’s organizational culture as an essential contextual moderating variable affecting the relationship between relational behavior, supplier satisfaction and preferential resource allocation. Our quantitative study, including 377 survey responses, applied multigroup analyses and polynomial regressions with response surface analyses to test the interactive effects of organizational culture and relational behavior. The results showed that a supplier’s market culture influences the relationship between relational behavior, supplier satisfaction, and resource allocation. Both high and low levels of market culture allow for different relational strategies of a buying firm. Additionally, the insignificance of other organizational cultures (i.e., clan, hierarchy and adhocracy) raises questions about the validity of the most popular assessment method of corporate cultures, the CVF conceptualization. The implications of these findings are discussed in the paper.