Ensuring corporate travel compliance – Control vs. commitment strategies

Abstract

h i g h l i g h t sWe investigate travel policy compliance within a triadic travel supply chain. We focus on control and commitment strategies within the corporate travel context. Both control-and commitment-based strategies will gain traveller compliance. Service quality and proactive approach secure the use of the contracted services. Corporate travel management shares similar perspectives with leisure travel. a b s t r a c t Business travel has increased substantially during the past few decades. Business travel costs are one of the main controllable costs in international corporations, and thus companies are imposing stricter policies on corporate travel to create savings and efficiency. For travel management, the current literature suggests two alternative management strategies based on either a control-oriented or a commitmentoriented approach. In this paper we present an in-depth case study that investigates the impact that each type of strategy has on corporate travel policy compliance. Specifically, we investigate how the strategies are executed in a triadic travel supply chain setting, consisting of a corporate travel buyer, a business travel agency and a technology provider. Our findings show that both the control and commitment-based strategies are used in all stages of the travel process. The seminal finding is that the competitiveness and high quality of services provided internally by the buyer in collaboration with the triad members e rather than strict control and monitoring e is essential to travel policy compliance. This finding shows that corporate travel management shares similar perspectives to leisure travel in that service quality is key to securing business. Furthermore, a proactive approach to control via a wellestablished and reasonable travel policy is needed.

Cross-functional interconnectedness as an enabler of customer value

“…As mentioned in the introduction, due to its deeper focus of analysis, the perspective of triads may provide richer results than the studies based on dyads due to the possibility of analyzing interconnectedness (Schreiner, 2015; Wu and Choi, 2005; Wynstra et al , 2015). However, the studied literature only presents studies using this perspective at an external level among companies (Choi and Wu, 2009a; Havila et al , 2004; Holma et al , 2015; Sampson and Money, 2015; Vedel et al , 2012). In a cross-functional context, interconnectedness may be defined as the influence of a given function on the quality of the relationship between two or more peer functions.…”

“…This network perspective, rather than dyads, may provide richer results and open up new research fronts, with special attention paid to interconnectedness (Schreiner, 2015; Wu and Choi, 2005; Wynstra et al , 2015). Previous literature presents interconnectedness either at an interpersonal level, in social psychology and sociology (Heider, 1958), or at an external level between companies (Choi and Wu, 2009a; Havila et al , 2004; Vedel et al , 2012; Holma et al , 2015; Sampson and Money, 2015; Ferreira et al , 2017). Therefore, the studied literature gives poor evidence about concepts that emerge from the perspective of cross-functional networks, which is the context of analysis of this study.…”

Controlling and enabling practices to manage supply in online service triads

“…More recent literature demonstrates the relevance of intense interpersonal and electronic information exchange, high-level operational linkages, a moderate level of relationship formalization and having legal bonds, as well as the relevance of sharing cooperative norms such as mutuality, durability and flexibility (Karatzas et al, 2017), while also building a social contract in the pre-contractual stage (Broekhuis and Scholten, 2018). Further, Holma et al (2015) found that controlling suppliers and establishing their commitment to complying with the buyer's policy is essential, while Wuyts et al (2015) found that a close relationship between supplier and consumers and relatively stable consumer requirements are essential elements in assuring the service quality provided by the suppliers. Recently, Bastl et al (2019) showed that both control and coordination mechanisms are required and that using these mechanisms is not the responsibility of a single actor (the buyer), but the shared responsibility of two or maybe all three actors depending on the context.…”

The transport service triad: a key unit of analysis

“…The roots of triad research can be found in sociology and in the works of Simmel (1908). However, the interest to study triads in business contexts has increased lately, resulting in a number of conceptual (Sengupta et al, 2018b;Siltaloppi and Vargo, 2017;Vedel et al, 2016), as well as empirical studies (Broekhuis and Scholten, 2018;Holma et al, 2015;Karatzas et al, 2016;Sengupta et al, 2018a) where triads are in focus.…”

“…Vedel et al (2016) divide triadic structures into four types, depending on the degree of the triad's internal cohesiveness and the ability of the triad to act as an entity. In a group-like triad (Dubois and Fredriksson, 2008;Holma, 2012;Holma et al, 2015), the degree of internal cohesiveness can be high, and there are strong ties and direct connections between all the three actors. In a set-of-connected-actors type of triad, there is low degree of internal cohesiveness, the ties between the actors are weak and all the three actors are not necessarily directly connected.…”