How Do Multinational Suppliers Formulate Mechanisms of Global Account Coordination? An Integrative Framework and Empirical Study

Abstract

Existing global account management (GAM) studies mostly focus on multinational suppliers’ decision on which customers to serve with GAM programs, while paying limited attention to how to formulate mechanisms of global account coordination to best serve a chosen account. The issue of making optimal choices on specific coordination modes is pressing to global account managers because GAM programs are both costly and consequential. First, building on prior research that suggests the existence of two modes of global account coordination—namely, interorganizational coordination (IOC) and intercountry coordination (ICC)—the authors propose a formal framework that delineates their similarities and differences along the domain (internal vs. external), level (horizontal vs. vertical), and foci (strategic execution vs. relationship maintenance). Second, following the resource-based view and power-dependency theory, the authors propose an integrative framework on how various supplier, interorganizational, and customer factors influence global marketing managers’ coordination mechanism choices. They further advance several hypotheses on the curvi-linear nature of influences of several antecedents on coordination mode choices and examine the impacts of forms of global account coordination modes on suppliers’ market and relational performance. They test the conceptual model using data collected from a cross-national sample of more than 200 global account managers. The findings show that the two coordination modes have different sets of antecedents and exert independent, different influences on supplier performance. Therefore, they should be treated separately in research as well as practice.