This study investigates the effects of entrepreneurial personality traits, background and networking activities on venture growth among 168 Chinese entrepreneurs in small and medium sized businesses in Singapore. Personality traits include need for achievement, internal locus of control, self-reliance and extroversion; background comprises education and experience; networking activities consist of size and frequency of communication networks. A structural equation modelling technique -partial least squares (PLS) -is used to estimate a path model with latent variables. The results indicate that experience, networking activities, and number of partners as well as internal locus of control and need for achievement all have positive impact on venture growth. Two other personality traits, self-reliance and extroversion have negative impact on number of partners and positive impact on networking activities, respectively. The impact of education on venture growth, however, is moderated by firm size, positive for larger firms and negative for smaller firms. Our findings indicate that among all the factors that we have considered, an entrepreneur's industrial and managerial experience is the dominating factor affecting venture growth.

This research focuses on buying firms’ trust in a supplier's salesperson and posits that this type of trust is determined by characteristics of the salesperson, the interpersonal relationships between a salesperson and the buying firm's boundary personnel, and characteristics of personal interactions between these two parties. More important, the authors discuss the concept of interpersonal relationships in the context of Chinese culture and model it as a three-dimensional latent construct, which, in some literature, is called guanxi. A key aspect of this research is that the authors investigate the impact of each dimension of guanxi on salesperson trust separately. Moreover, the authors consider the buying firm's trust in the supplying firm and its long-term orientation toward the supplier the consequences of salesperson trust. To test the model, the authors use data collected from 128 buying organizations in Hong Kong. The sampled firms are from both the government and private sectors.

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Reports on a cross‐cultural study of retail bargaining behaviour between American and Chinese customers. The framework of the Fishbein behavioural intention model is applied to the retail bargaining setting, and bargaining style is treated as an action “caused” by bargaining intention, which is in turn affected by the subjective norm and bargaining attitude. The respondents were 100 American and 100 Chinese Singaporean customers. The findings of this study suggest that the Fishbein behavioural intention model can be used to explain the retail bargaining behaviour of both American and Chinese customers. The study also found that Chinese people have a higher level of bargaining intention and a more competitive bargaining style than the Americans, although the bargaining attitudes and subjective norms of the two groups do not differ.

This article addresses some important issues in risk-return, or mean-variance, research. Much of the research in this tradition has used Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory to explain Bowman's proposition that "troubled f m s " prefer and seek risk. Unfortunately, two key constructs in prospect theory, reference point and risk attitude, have not been applied in risk-return research in ways consistent with prospect theory. The author examines a series of inconsistencies in the use of prospect theory in risk-return research to date and suggests remedies. A proposed approach using a longitudinal research design at the individual-firm level is applied in an empirical test of the Bowman hypothesis with data from brewing firms in the United States. The findings strongly support the Bowman hypothesis.

The authors focus on emergent buying center networks in firms that recently have purchased an expensive, complex, technological product. The authors examine how a person's information control and influence vary within such networks. The purpose of this study is to assess the relative contribution of information control, individual attributes, and organization structure variables on influence. The authors find that factors related to the person are the most important in explaining a buying center member's influence for this type of purchasing decision. Although less important, the variables of information control, decentralization, and formalization also affect influence. Overall, the authors find strong empirical support for their model.

Metadata onlyTypically, research on organizational learning has been conceptual in nature. In a departure from this tradition, we develop and test a structural model of organizational learning in the context of the purchasing of an expensive and complex product in the information technology (IT) area. The key focus of our research is the participation of external IT consultants and our model links seven explanatory constructs that are consistent with the process school of thought in organizational learning. More specifically, two organizational variables–formalization, strategic importance–and two individual-level variables–stakeholding, prior experience–are viewed as antecedents of consultant participation. In contrast, we view internal search effort, external search effort, and organizational learning as consequences of consultant participation. As predicted, all four antecedent variables affected consultant participation. Moreover, we found that, while consultant participation had a positive impact on internal search effort and organizational learning, its impact on external information search effort was negative