프랜차이즈 본부의 운영지원과 슈퍼바이저지원이 가맹점의 결속과 관계만족, 협력에 미치는 영향

Much of the channel literature have found commitment to be a critically important element for establishing and maintaining long-term relationships between business partners. This is especially important for franchise system because franchisors and franchisees are independent entities linked in a contractual relationship. Most studies on franchise systems have used commitment as a global construct that measures affectively motivated commitment which is the intention to continue the relationship. The use of global commitment measures, however, could lead to distorted findings or conceal the underlying effects of commitment dimensions due to the confounding effects of uni-dimensional commitment. Therefore, this study was to examine commitment not as a global measure, but as a multidimensional measure, that is, affective commitment and calculative commitment. This study used these two constructs because these have been most frequently mentioned in the channel studies and could reflect very different underlying psychological states, providing different implications. The franchisor supports, meanwhile, is the most important to establish a commitment between the franchisor and the franchisee. This makes sense, given that the franchising business format is based on the contract and franshisor provided supports is a strong motivation for franchisee to be attracted to franchise system. Previous studies, however, on franchise supports have lacked conceptualization and development of measures for the key variables. Furthermore, although the literature has often examined the franchisor supports like marketing support or logistics support, empirical knowledge about supervising supports like field visit or supervising support which are the key component of franchise system has remained relatively scarce. Given that the supervisor is perceived as the agent of the franchisor and take on a critical role for coodinating, supervising support must not be overlooked. Therefore, the purpose of this study was threefold. First, we wanted to classify and conceptualize franchisor supports into operation support and supervising support. Second, we investigated whether these supports had different effects on affective commitment and calculative commitment. Finally, this study was conducted to verify how each dimension of commitment had affects differently on relationship satisfaction and cooperation. Based on the literature, a conceptual model was built including franchisor's operation and supervising support as antecedents of affective, calculative commitment with a positive influence. Relationship satisfaction and cooperation were the consequences of affective, calculative commitment with a positive influence of affective commitment and negative influence of calculative commitment on relationship satisfaction and cooperation. The research model is as follows. <Figure 1> Research Model In order to test the model, a group of franchisees in a major health functional food franchise in Korea was chosen. With the assistance of the major health functional food franchise, a total 252 surveys were conducted randomly to the owners of the franchisees. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to evaluate construct reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity. This study examined Structural Equation Modeling to analyze the research hypotheses. Hypothesis Path Coeffieient Standard error t-value Result 1a Training → Affective Commitment -.018 .071 -.262 not supported 1b Informatin System → Affective Commitment .238 .077 3.077** supported 1c Promotion → Affective Commitment .221 .075 2.963** supported 2a Training → Calculative Commitment -.005 .066 -.081 not supported 2b Informatin System → Calculative Commitment .161 .073 2.213* supported 2c Promotion → Calculative Commitment -.029 .069 -.416 not supported 3a Supervisor Attitude → Affective Commitment .197 .079 2.483* supported 3b Supervisor Expertise → Affective Commitment .207 .068 3.051** supported 4a Supervisor Attitude → Calculative Commitment .045 .074 .611 not supported 4b Supervisor Expertise → Calculative Commitment .152 .064 2.370* supported 5a Affective Commitment → Relationship Satisfaction .969 .092 10.489*** supported 5b Affective Commitment → Cooperation .649 .088 7.361*** supported 6a Calculative Commitment → Relationship Satisfaction -.157 .114 -1.387 not supported 6b Calculative Commitment → Cooperation -.063 .109 -.578 not supported model fit: χ2=1192.645, df=677, p=.000, NFI=.867, TLI=.931, CFI=.937, RMR=.044, RMSEA=.055 *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001 <Table 1> Result of the Proposed Model As shown <Table 1>, the results showed that franchisor’s operation and supervising support had a different influence on the dimensions of commitment and the dimensions of commitment also had affect differently on relationship performance. The result indicated that promotion support out of franchisor's operation support positively affected a franchisee's affective commitment. Information system, however, not only affected a franchisee's affective commitment, but it also influenced a franchisee's calculative commitment. In the same way, supervisor attitude out of supervising support positively had only impact on a franchisee's affective commitment, but supervisor expertise had both effects on franchisee's affective commitment and calculative commitment. Finally, franchisee's affective commitment was related positively to relationship satisfaction and cooperation. The contribution of this study lies in the conceptualization of franchisor's support and testing of a model that includes supervising support, that is, supervisor attitude and expertise. Past research on franchise support often fails to include the supervising support as a critical element in relationship building between franchisor and franchisee, this study demonstrated that supervising support is indeed important in reinforcing franchisee' commitment. Furthermore, we tried to examine multidimensional of commitment especially in the development of theoretical linkages between the franchisor support and commitment. The findings of this study have important implications for franchisor. Information System and supervisor expertise not only can have effect on franchisee's affective commitment, but it also can influence calculative franchisee's commitment. Franchisor should understand that these are the foundation for sound relationship building in a franchise system. Although all of operation and supervising support cannot improve franchisee's commitment directly, it definitely can improve the trustworthy image of the franchise system. Therefore, franchisor should provide franchisee with timely effective information and need to enhance education of supervisor to improve their expertise. In addition, franchisor also should pay attention to reinforcing franchisee's affective commitment because it is the key of the ultimate relationship management to maintain long-term relationships between franchisor and franchisee.