On distributor commitment in marketing channels for industrial products: Contrast between the United States and Japan

Previous studies have highlighted task environmental factors as the sole drivers of a distributor's commitment to its supplier and have found positive consequences of distributor commitment. The authors propose institutional factors as another motive for distributor commitment in channel relationships. Specifically, the authors suggest that long-term orientation is an essential institutional environment to consider for a comparative study of distributor commitment. The authors hypothesize that distributor commitment is driven by both task environmental factors and institutional factors. The authors conduct national surveys of industrial distributors in the United States and Japan to test the hypotheses. The hypothesis test results indicate that task environmental factors are related significantly to distributor commitment regardless of the channel contexts and that the effect of an institutional factor varies across the channel contexts.