Zhigang Shou’s research while affiliated with Wuhan University and other places

Marketers often use narrative ads as a powerful tool to shape consumer attitudes. These ads deliver key messages through storytelling, but what makes a story effective in the eyes of the consumer remains largely unexplored. Using a Facebook field study and a series of four experimental studies, we examined the interaction between the narrative's temporal type (nostalgia vs. forestalgia) and the characters' self‐construal (interdependent vs. independent) on consumer attitudes. Drawing on regulatory focus theory and regulatory fit theory, we found that consumers prefer forestalgia (vs. nostalgia) narrative ads when paired with an independent (vs. interdependent) character. In addition, this effect was mediated by narrative transportation, which enhanced consumers' attitudes toward the ad. These findings advance our understanding of effective narrative advertising and offer practical insights for marketers by highlighting the importance of aligning the narrative temporal type with the character's self‐construal to create more impactful ads.

Purpose Interorganizational dependence is considered as a liability for each firm and needs to be managed properly. Rather than exploring the opportunistic outcome of dependence, the authors focus on the moderating role of supply chain boundary spanners' guanxi . This study tends to uncover the way and the conditions under which boundary spanners' guanxi influences dependence-opportunism relationships. Design/methodology/approach Using a survey of 380 buyer–supplier exchanges in China, this study first examines the relationship between dependence and opportunism, then assesses the contingent role of boundary spanners' guanxi and further tests how unfairness perception and legal inefficiency alter the role of guanxi in managing dependence. Findings This study finds that buyer dependence increases supplier opportunism while supplier dependence lowers supplier opportunism. Boundary spanners' guanxi weakens the opportunism-facilitating impact of buyer dependence and mitigates the opportunism-restricting effect of supplier dependence. However, unfairness perception would attenuate the value of guanxi in restricting depended sides' opportunism but strengthen the value of guanxi in motivating depending sides' opportunism; legal inefficiency would amplify the value of guanxi in facilitating depending suppliers' opportunism. Originality/value First, the study enriches supply chain dependence studies by incorporating interpersonal guanxi into the investigation of dependence-opportunism relationships. Second, the study adds to the supply chain management literature by uncovering a contrasting role of guanxi in influencing the dependence-opportunism relationship. Third, the study incorporates an agency view to uncover two boundary conditions under which guanxi is mobilized for personal interest seeking or for organizational purposes.

Although gift giving, a catalyst of guanxi, plays an important role in doing business in China, few studies have examined how to give a proper gift within business-to-business guanxi. Drawing on guanxi and gift-giving literature, this study investigates gift acceptability in the light of gift type and guanxi in two dimensions (relational closeness and relative status) in a hierarchical Chinese business circle. We classify gifts into monetary and nonmonetary gifts. The findings from two scenario-based experiments indicate that a monetary gift versus a nonmonetary gift decreases gift acceptability through the increased level of perceived manipulation (PM) and face threat (FT) and these indirect effects are contingent on different guanxi types. The mediating roles of both PM and FT turn more significant when relational closeness (gift recipient's status relative to giver) increases. These findings help Western businesspeople select the right gift form to give to the right Chinese counterparts in the right way.

To improve our understanding of the bright side and the dark side of political ties and determine the processes linking political ties to firm performance in emerging markets, we investigate the underlying mechanism of political ties’ effects from the perspective of dynamic capability theory and institutional theory. We posit that reduced market-focused innovation capability and strengthened legitimacy mediate the effect of political ties on firm performance. In addition, to capture the nature of the relationship between political ties and performance, we adopt a contingency perspective in our examination of the moderating roles of legal enforceability and competitive intensity. Specifically, we suggest that legal enforceability buffers the negative impact of political ties on market-focused innovation capability but mitigates the positive impact of political ties on firm legitimacy. Moreover, competitive intensity enhances the positive impact of market-focused innovation capability and firm legitimacy on firm performance. We test our hypotheses using a survey with 362 respondents in China. In conclusion, our findings provide important insights into how Chinese firms effectively utilize political ties to improve their performance.

This study integrates dynamic capabilities and relational governance theories to examine how business ties and political ties affect firm performance. The findings from a survey of 187 Chinese distributors of construction and decoration materials indicate that increased firm adaptive capability and reduced opportunism mediate the contribution of both ties to firm performance. In addition, legal enforceability and demand uncertainty determine the relative prominence of the two process intermediaries in joint consideration with the type of social ties (i.e., business ties and political ties). Specifically, political ties foster firm performance mainly by constraining supplier opportunism when legal enforceability is weak, whereas adaptive capability has a stronger mediating effect in the link between business ties and firm performance when demand uncertainty is high.

The effectiveness of contracts is bounded by the institutional environment in which they are designed and enforced. When firms form supply chain partnerships in emerging markets, they may experience contract ineffectiveness, which is defined as a firm's perceived limits of contracts with respect to safeguarding interests and coordinating activities. Specifically, we identify two institutional factors that may give rise to contract ineffectiveness, information transparency and legal enforceability, as they determine how effectively a firm designs and enforces a contract. In addition, we reveal that contract ineffectiveness prompts a firm to seek social ties, including business ties and political ties, to overcome the institutionally induced limits of contracts. These efforts, however, are moderated by the type of predominant pressure a firm bears. While equity pressure strengthens the relationship between contract ineffectiveness and a firm's pursuit of social ties, efficiency pressure weakens this relationship, because seeking social ties imposes an extra burden of efficiency. Tested by data collected from 187 distributors in China, our study reveals the institutional causes and the consequences of contract ineffectiveness, which is a common problem encountered by firms when forming supply chain partnerships in emerging markets.

Despite a consensus that business expansion drives firm effectiveness, extant literature has neglected the exact relationship between business expansion and firm efficiency. Using secondary data from the US and Chinese banking industries, this study explores two efficiencies of exploratory expansion (i.e., investing in new business, outside the scope of the firm’s existing business) and exploitative expansion (i.e., expanding target markets in the existing business)—profitability and marketability. The empirical results reveal that exploratory expansion decreases profitability but increases marketability. Meanwhile, exploitative expansion has no significant effect on profitability, but it can increase marketability. Furthermore, the study reveals that Chinese banks are likely to benefit more from exploratory expansion, whereas US banks would benefit from exploitative expansion.

This study examines the moderating effects of institutional forces on the capabilities–performance link by combining the resource-base view and institutional theory. From a survey of 324 Chinese manufacturers, this study tests the impacts of the importance of guanxi (an informal institutional factor) and legal support (a formal institutional factor) on the performance advantages of firm capabilities. The results indicate that both marketing and technology capabilities relate positively to performance, but the performance advantage of technology capabilities is less prominent when guanxi is important and the legal system is ineffective. In addition, guanxi importance strengthens the performance advantage of domestic firms' marketing capabilities but reduces that of foreign firms' marketing capabilities in China.

Does a growing market or a declining market promote firm information sharing? Resource dependence theory and strategic action theory propose competing arguments. This study reconciles the conflicting views by examining the deployment structure of firm-specific assets as a boundary condition. An investigation of 324 Chinese buyers demonstrates that when firm asset specificity is asymmetrical, the buyer is more likely to share information with the supplier in a growing market but less likely to do so in a declining market; in contrast, when specific assets are bilateral, the buyer is more likely to share information whether the market demand grows or declines.

This study examines how a trusting relationship influences firm boundary agents' guanxi behavior which involves saving face (wei hu mianzi), and affect investment (ganqing tou zi). At the individual level, we decompose trust into its competence and goodwill forms and examine their relative and interactive effects on guanxi behavior. A study conducted among 354 Chinese purchasing managers reveals that both competence trust and goodwill trust promote guanxi behavior, and these two types of character trust are substitutive for each other in terms of motivating the use of guanxi. At the firm level, calculative trust directly affects guanxi behavior and also negatively moderates the effect of competence trust on guanxi behavior. These results imply that calculative trust may substitute for competence trust in facilitating economic transactions and thereby reduce the use of guanxi in business interactions.