How informants report about interorganizational relationships

Abstract

This dissertation applies cognitive psychology perspectives to investigate how organizational informants report about interorganizational relationships within an industrial channel of distribution. There is currently a growing interest among both practitioners and scholars in understanding the determinants of successful interorganizational relationships. However many of the variables believed to be related to successful interorganizational relationships are unobservable and the difficulty of obtaining valid measures of these latent constructs continue to challenge researchers. This difficulty is compounded when the more rigorous multiple informant methods are used. In the past, work on the quality of multiple informant reports has concentrated on measuring the variance in multiple informant reports rather than on understanding how or why this variation occurs. Since the vast majority of the empirical work investigating interorganizational relationships have used surveys for data collection, this project draws on the growing literature that has applied cognitive psychology perspectives to understand how survey respondents report about themselves and how proxy-respondents report about close others. This research extends this literature and identifies both the cognitive processes and data sources used by informants when reporting about their organization, and examines how agreement, or consensus, among multiple informant reports is related to the type of information being sought by the survey question and the similarity of the cognitive processes and data sources used by the informants. Hour-long "thinkaloud" interviews were conducted with 109 informants from 35 industrial manufacturing firms who answered questions asking about their firm's relationship with two of its downstream channel partners. Findings include recommendations for improving organizational surveys.