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Experiential and Informational Knowledge, Architectural Marketing Capabilities, and the Adaptive Performance of Export Ventures: A Cross-National Study
Decision Sciences, Spring 2003 by Morgan, Neil A, Zou, Shaoming, Vorhies, Douglas W, Katsikeas, Constantine S
Once finalized, the English version of the questionnaire was independently translated into Chinese by three native Chinese speakers. Where any differences were observed between the three translations, a discussion was held involving all three translators and the differences were resolved. This Chinese version of the questionnaire was then independently translated back into English by two different English-Chinese translators. Minor differences between the two back-translations were resolved by discussions between the two translators. Overall, the back-translated version matched the original English version very well, suggesting the quality of the translation (see Douglas & Craig, 1983). Once both the English and Chinese versions of the questionnaire were finalized, each was printed in a professionally typeset booklet.
Data Collection
In collecting data to test our hypotheses, our research design choices were guided by two characteristics of the export venture context revealed in the exporting literature and our fieldwork. First, firms do not separately report on the performance and operation of export venture business units in their published reports, and no other secondary data sources are available that provide indicants of the phenomena of interest in our study (e.g., Katsikeas et al., 2000). Second, most export ventures have a relatively small number of employees, usually with a single overall manager. Our interviews strongly indicated that among export venture personnel, only the export venture manager was knowledgeable concerning all of the knowledge base, architectural marketing capabilities, and adaptive performance phenomena of interest in our study. Further, our interviews suggested that while informants other than the export venture manager may be able to provide data on individual constructs of interest in some export ventures, these informants would be unlikely to be as knowledgeable on these issues as the export venture manager. This indicated that an export venture manager key informant primary data collection design was appropriate for our study.
While the key informant data collection approach we adopted is the most widely used in organizational research, potential problems can be associated with collecting data on organizational phenomena from a single informant. We were therefore careful to follow accepted methodological guidelines commonly used to mitigate these potential problems concerning identifying and motivating the most knowledgeable key informants and designing and pretesting our measurement scales and survey instrument to maximize the validity of the data collected (e.g., Huber & Power, 1985). Following Huber & Power's (1985) guidelines, we paid particular attention to identifying appropriate key informants by name and job title. In line with prior research (e.g., Cavusgil & Zou, 1994; Myers, 1999) and on the basis of our fieldwork interviews, we identified the most knowledgeable individual as the export venture manager, the executive directly involved in and responsible for the particular export venture being studied. Where an appropriate export venture manager could not be identified through publicly available information sources, telephone calls were made to individual firms to identify an appropriately knowledgeable export venture manager key informant. Our interviews indicated that the job titles of such managers in Chinese export ventures varied much more widely than in the United Kingdom. This made it difficult to identify appropriately knowledgeable key informants in China from public sources. We therefore contacted the president of each firm in the Chinese sample, who under the Chinese "president responsibility system" is the most knowledgeable contact concerning strategy and business operations in Chinese firms (Lukas, Tan, & Hult, 2001). The nature of the study was explained to each firm's president, and each was shown a copy of the survey instrument and asked to identify an appropriately knowledgeable key informant in one of the firm's export ventures. We then contacted each identified informant to explain the purpose of the study, and to solicit participation with offers of a report on study findings and guarantees of confidentiality.
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