A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CONFLICT HANDLING STYLES AND RESPONSES IN OUTSOURCING AND FRANCHISING RELATIONSHIPS IN FOUR COUNTRIES: SAUDI ARABIA, AUSTRALIA, MALAYSIA AND SINGAPORE

In intensely competitive environments, many companies see non-ownership services (e.g. outsourcing and franchising) respectively as a way to hire companies to perform routine business functions or to replicate the business model in another market, and then focus corporate resources on key activities in their value chain where the impact will be felt the most by the customer (Leavy 2004; Ndubisi, 2011; 2013). Both business models bear the promise to relieve principals/clients from costs and burdens of ownership by transforming clients uncertainty-downsides into business opportunities for outsourcing services providers or franchisees. However, relationship conflicts can and do occur at inter-personal and inter-organizational levels. How parties to the relationship handle conflicts can affect the strength and future of the relationship. Yet very limited attention has been paid to how conflicts are managed in outsourcing and franchising relationships, and the effects of different conflict handling styles on relationship outcomes namely relationship satisfaction, relationship trust and relationship commitment. This gap forms the first impetus for the present study (OBJECTIVE 1). Second, research effort is needed to ascertain if the effects of conflict handling styles are generic or contextual. As such a comparative research on behavioural and attitudinal responses to conflict handling styles across cultures is necessary but ironically sparse, leading to poor understanding of this phenomenon. Extant conflict literatures document several typologies of conflict handling based on the degree of concern for self and for others in a relationship (e.g. Ndubisi, 2011; 2013; Rahim, 1983; 2000). A key dimension of culture which is related to, and have important implications on inter-personal and business-to-business (henceforth b2b) relationship is uncertainty avoidance (Ndubisi, Malhotra, Ulas & Ndubisi, 2012). The study therefore compares and contrasts conflict handling style-response relationship in four countries with different scores and ranks on uncertainty avoidance indexes (UAI) namely, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore (OBJECTIVE 2). The four countries respective scores/ranks on UAI are: 68/24-25, 51/17, 36/8 and 8/1 (Hofstede, 1984). The outcome of the study will be published in high impact academic and practitioner journals, and presented to outsourcing and franchising practitioners to enhance theory and managerial practice (OBJECTIVE 3). The study will be conducted in the four countries for a period of 12 months in two phases. Phase 1 and phase 2 of the study will respectively take a qualitative and a quantitative approach. In the Qualitative phase (1) there will be an exploration of conflict encounters using a research method that can capture the unique subjective qualities of conflict handling styles or service delivery (Grove and Fisk, 1997). As such secondary data collection and critical incident technique (CIT) meet this criterion, as these methods can be employed to respectively understand extant research on the phenomenon and to investigate the various aspects of a service over the duration of an encounters enactment. The later technique is a form of content analysis used to clarify critical incidents or narratives with the intent of unveiling emergent themes. In the second phase, data will be collected using structured questionnaire. Appropriate statistical analyses namely Factor and Reliability analyses, Structural Equations Model and Hierarchical Multiple Regression analysis will be conducted. These analysis techniques will be used for the purposes of identifying the underlying dimensions of the data, assessing the degree of consistency between the multiple measurements of the variables, and predict the direct, mediating and moderating effects respectively.