Patrick Saparito

Saint Joseph's University (PA, USA) · Department of Management

Marketing executives, especially in the services industry, invest effort and money in building trust by being customer oriented, ensuring managerial continuity, and rewarding long standing customers. Documenting the positive effect of marketing efforts aimed at building customer trust in terms of firm performance helps marketing executives gain a b...

The ability to create tacit knowledge is important to the competitive advantage of firms in general but is critical to the survival and growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Consequently, SME strategic orientations that facilitate tacit knowledge creation, especially in hostile environments, are important factors that can enhance SME...

This study examines how small-business owners'/managers' perceptions about their banking relationships are influenced by the gender of both the small-business owner/manager and the bank manager. This study draws from social network theory and status expectations state theory to test how gender influences key perceptions about the bank–firm relation...

This study demonstrates how banks' bureaucratic systems (i.e., formalization, management continuity, customer orientation) are associated with social capital's relational and cognitive dimensions. We collected survey data from a matched sample of 884 small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SME) executives and 217 bank managers across 22 banks to test...

Trust researchers have called for additional work examining trust breaches and trust erosion, as well as an explicit inclusion of affect in trust models. This paper directly responds to these calls. Based on a critical analysis and extension of Mayer, Davis and Schoorman's (1995) integrative trust model, we examine the relative amount of positive a...

While intense global competition drives firms to move knowledge-based activities offshore to take advantage of inexpensive foreign labour, there are increased costs with monitoring and managing activities located in distant locations. Additionally, certain knowledge types may be more difficult to transfer and assimilate across national borders. Bot...

The authors use a trust perspective to highlight the parallels between agency and sociological discussions concerning relationships between banks and small firms. Using the trust typology developed by Lewicki and Bunker (1996), the authors explore how the length and breadth of the bank–firm relationship and the bank's customer orientation influence...

Inadequate credit access is an acute problem for small businesses, particularly in the current economic climate. US banks have moved away from building long-term relationships with small firms. However, research is equivocal on whether such a strategic stance decreases small firms' credit access within the USA. Using the knowledge-based view of the...

Knowledge about small firmspsila circumstances in the debt finance markets is unevenly dispersed. Since efficient debt markets depend upon bankspsila adequate knowledge to make investment decisions, the mechanisms by which knowledge is transferred become particularly salient. Using information richness and structural embeddedness theories, we exami...

This study examined how the gender of the entrepreneur and of the bank account manager influences perceptions about the banking relationship. Drawing from social network and status expectations state theories of gendered interaction, we test hypotheses exploring the influence of trust, the bank’s knowledge of the firm, satisfaction with credit, and...

Using a matched sample of 1,677 responses from small-firm executives collected from the National Foundation of Independent Business (Scott, Dunkelberg & Dennis, Jr., 2003), we examine the direct and mediating role of a bank's knowledge about firms on those firms' access to debt finance. Specifically, we examine how firm size and bank organizational...

Since knowledge is a critical resource for ensuring firm growth and survival, firms are increasingly going outside their boundaries and collaborating with other organizations to obtain new knowledge. This study focuses on two distinct self-enforcing safeguards important for interorganizational knowledge transfer. Using survey questionnaire data fro...

Entrepreneurship—the recognition and exploitation of opportunities—is valuable within organizations as well as in the establishment of new ventures. Some studies have addressed the issue why some individuals take advantage of opportunities and some do not. While some studies find that psychological variables, personality traits and demographic fact...

While most organizational theories avoid emotion, many entrepreneurs act with emotion. Entrepreneurs often describe their businesses as their “babies,” expressing personal connection and even identification with their businesses. We therefore suggest that through exploring associated relational metaphors, we can gain additional insight into entrepr...

Using data on 935 small firms and bank managers, we differentiated customers' relational trust in their banks from beliefs about the banks' self-interested motivations. Relational trust mediated the relationship between bank strategies (customer orientation and manager continuity) and the likelihood a firm would switch banks, and the effect of trus...

We examine trust's central role in bank-small firm relationships. In doing so, we draw upon two trust perspectives which pervade the inter-organizational literature: calculus-based trust and relational trust. We draw connections between previous agency and sociological discussions on bank-small firm relationships and highlight the parallels between...

Although industry-university relationships (I/URs) are of growing importance for creating knowledge and new technologies, I/URs remain relatively understudied. We build a theoretical framework that examines communication frequency, a facet of communication effectiveness, the personalness of the communication form (i.e., face-to-face, telephone, e-m...

Researchers criticize the transaction cost economics (TCE) paradigm for over-generalizing the assumption of opportunism as human nature. We suggest that opportunistic propensity is affected by cultural prior conditioning of individualism-collectivism (I-C). Specifically, we propose that individualists have a higher opportunistic propensity in intra...

Since the early 1980s, new ventures with high growth potential and large capital needs have found an ever-increasing pool of venture capital available to support their growth. However, the flow of venture capital investment to women-led businesses remains meager in spite of the fact that in the US and Europe an increasing number of businesses are o...

Since the early 1980s, new ventures with high growth potential and large capital needs have found an ever-increasing pool of venture capital available to support their growth. However, the flow of venture capital investment to women-led businesses remains meager in spite of the fact that in the US and Europe an increasing number of businesses are o...

This article argues that quality business requires rediscovering pedagogy as a professional calling and studied activity. The authors chronicle forces driving reform in business and higher education. They then explore both the growing importance of reflective learning in professional education and a model that they have developed and implemented fo...