가맹본부의 사전 통제가 가맹본부에 대한 가맹점의 신뢰, 몰입, 관계성과에 미치는 영향: 사후 통제의 조절 효과를 중심으로

Purpose: Korean franchising industry has been rapidly growing since its introduction in the late 1970s. As of 2017, as a result, franchising industry accounted for 6.9% of South Korea’s nominal GDP-which is 1,730 trillion won- and employment in the industry accounted for 4.5% of economically active population in South Korea. Furthermore, statistics index shows that there are 4,882 franchise headquarters in South Korea, and this exceeds the figure of U.S. and Japan, of which the number is approximately 3,000 and 1,339 respectively. Various advantages of franchising system are recognized as an attractive business model not only by founders but also by businesses. Franchise headquarter and franchisee are legally independent with different objectives but economically interdependent, and this constructs diversified organizational structure which makes it difficult for customers to distinguish two partners. The unique contract form makes various governance of franchisor affect relationship between franchisor and franchisee as well as franchisee’s business performance. Therefore, franchise headquarter and franchisee need to understand one another’s stance and make a concerted effort to develop the system based on the principle of reciprocity. This research focused on a long-term relationship between franchise headquarter and franchisee, in which partners pursue mutual growth. Under this relationship, the author aimed to figure out which governance mechanism affects franchisee’s trust and commitment toward headquarter. The purpose of this paper is also to analyze relationship outcome, especially opportunistic behavior and relationship continuity, from franchisee’s point of view. This paper is distinctive from preceding research in that the author examines ex-ante governance and inspects the effect of ex-ante and ex-post governance simultaneously in a single research model. The model of this study is shown in Figure 1. Results: The results of this study are as Table 1~2. First, the author set contractual completeness, safeguarding clauses, and extra contractual incentives as ex-ante governance mechanisms and assumed that these mechanisms would positively affect franchisee’s trust toward headquarter. The result shows that, unexpectedly, contractual completeness and safeguarding clauses have a positive effect on trust, however, incentives do not have significant impact. Secondly, it was presumed that multidimensional trust-credibility and benevolence, would have positive effect on multidimensional commitment-affect and calculative commitment- toward franchise headquarter. The result supported a hypothesis in respect of benevolence, since benevolence has a positive effect on both multidimensional commitments. On the other hand, it turned out to be that although credibility positively affects affective commitment, it negatively affects calculative commitment. Thirdly, in terms of relationship between multidimensional commitments and relationship outcome variables, the research confirmed author’s hypothesis that affective commitment reduces opportunistic behavior and calculative commitment increases opportunistic behavior. The research also confirmed that multidimensional commitments have a positive effect on relationship continuity. In particular, affective commitment has a stronger positive impact than calculative commitment. Lastly, in respect of moderating effect of ex-post governance mechanisms between multidimensional commitments and opportunistic behavior, affective commitment has less impact on opportunistic behavior in groups with high ex-post governance was negative. That means ex-post governance enlarges the effect of affective commitment on reducing opportunistic behavior. Conclusions: The implications of this study are as follows. First of all, unlike existing researches, that mostly focus on ex-post governance, this paper investigates ex-ante governance as well as ex-post governance in franchise industry. As a result, the research came up with the type of ex-ante governance mechanisms that can be utilized in franchise management. Secondly, the research verified that depending on the type of trust and its target variable, the effect toward commitment differs both in terms of degree and direction. Thirdly, the research proved that affective commitment has a strong impact on relationship outcome to the extent that the effect is bigger than that of calculative commitment. Lastly, ex-post governance has a moderating effect upon affective commitment in reducing opportunistic behavior. This result illustrates the role of ex-post governance as preventive measures against franchisee’s opportunistic behavior.