The Influence of Relationship Quality between Manufacturer and Retailer on Future Collaboration—A Case Study of Customer Electronic Product Channel in Taiwan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper studies the impact of relationship quality between manufacturer and retailer on future collaboration. The case study verifies that relationship quality will influence on relational trust and retailer’s satisfaction with manufacturer, and then relational trust will affect retailer’s satisfaction with manufacturer. Furthermore, the retailer’s satisfaction will influence on future collaboration between the retailer and the manufacturer. This paper is well organized and presented. The methodology is clearly discussed.

The authors are suggested to enrich the literature part, especially in the area of relationship quality and relational trust, to provide a more comprehensive research background.  

Survey questions might be appended to the paper.

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article deals with a very interesting topic, by exploring the collaboration between upstream manufacturer brands and first-line retailers.

After reading it, I would like to make several comments to be taken into account for its future publication:

1. Introduction. At the end of this section, the authors should include a paragraph summarising the structure of the article.

2. Literature review. For the authors, relationship quality is a unidimensional construct measured by 3 items. However, it would be interesting to mention that this construct has been conceptualised by other authors as a multidimensional construct composed of 3 dimensions: trust, commitment and satisfaction (see Palmatier, et al., 2006). After these statements, the authors should justify its choice as a unidimensional construct.

3. Hypothesis. 
3.1. The authors should include more previous studies to support the formulation of their hypotheses.
3.2. The authors could have included direct links between "trust and future collaboration" (Morgan and Hunt, 1994) and between "satisfaction and future collaboration" (Svensson et al., 2010). In my view, these links could increase the explained variance of the dependent construct.

4. Sample. It would be necessary to indicate the time (year) at which the authors collected the data.

5. Results. In table 5, it would be important to include the text of the indicators used to measure each variable.

6. Discussion. The authors could improve this section by linking their results with those obtained from previous literature.

Best of luck with the publication of the paper!

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

I appreciate having the opportunity to review the manuscript entitled “The influence of relationship quality between manufacturer and retailer on future collaboration- A case study of customer electronic product channel in Taiwan” (processes-1252818).

 

Although the authors have made considerable efforts to develop this paper, however, I believe that the current version of manuscript should be improved through significant revision and re-writing. I want to provide some suggestions for the improvement of this paper as follows.

 

[1] Introduction

- I think that the overall structure and writing of introduction part are not clear and well-aligned because it is not easy to catch what the research questions and strategies to deal with in this paper. Please clearly describe those things. As you already knew, the introduction section is one of the most important parts to not only draw attention of readers but also provide guidelines for them to facilitate a clear understanding of the paper. 

 

[2] Theories and hypotheses

- Although this paper dealt with interesting phenomena, it did not provide adequate theoretical background and support for the development of its hypotheses. This is the critical limitation of this paper. Please provide more elaborate explanations about it.

 

[3] Method

-  I recommend the authors to utilize bootstrapping technique to test the mediation effects.

- It is not easy for psychologists to accept and trust the result of indirect effect test from cross-sectional data. I think that you had better try to alleviate the issue pertinent to the impact of third variables or alternative explanations (1).

 

(1) Conway, J. M.; Lance, C. E. What reviewers should expect from authors regarding common method bias in organizational research. J. Bus. Psychol. 2010, 25, 325-334.

 

[3] Strengths and Limitations of the Study

- Although the authors have attempted to explain the contributions and implications of the paper, I think that the overall quality of the explanations is low. Please provide more elaborated explanations to demonstrate its theoretical and practical contributions.

 

 I wish these comment may help you to improve your paper. Good luck.

 

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

 

 Thank you for your efforts to revise the manuscript. And I think that the

revision was enough to reflect my suggestions. I appreciate it again.