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Announcement

Geyskens et al (1996) Winner of 2010 EMAC-IJRM Jan-Benedict Steenkamp Award for Long-Term Impact

Inge Geyskens, Jan Benedict Steenkamp, Lisa K. Scheer and Nirmalya Kumar won this year’s Long-Term Impact Award for their paper “The effects of trust and interdependence on relationship commitment: A trans-Atlantic study” (International Journal of Research in Marketing, 1996, 13 (4), pp 303-317).

The Steenkamp Award for Long-term Impact, established in 2008, is given annually by the European Marketing Academy (EMAC) and the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) to the most exceptional contribution in academic marketing research, published in IJRM 10 to 15 years ago, which have demonstrated long-term impact.

A 4-member Award Committee, formed by the IJRM editor and the EMAC VP of Publications, managed the nomination and selection procedure. For this year, the committee was composed of Peter C. Verhoef (chair), Zeynep Gurhan-Canli, Bruce G.S. Hardie, and Sandy D. Jap.

The following criteria were used to determine the winning paper: (1) the paper’s ISI citations; (2) the votes it receives from the IJRM Editorial Board members during two rounds of voting, and (3) the paper’s quality, as assessed by the award committee’s in-depth reading of the paper.

Following this procedure, the Geyskens et al paper (1996) won from among the 158 eligible papers published in IJRM from 1995 to 2000. According to the jury:

The paper of Geyskens et al. (1996) has had strong impact on research within marketing channels and relationship marketing. It is one of the first papers to study simultaneously three very important theoretical constructs within relationship marketing: commitment, interdependence and trust. Moreover, it strongly pledges for the existence of two components of commitment: affective and calculative commitment. In prior highly cited research (e.g., Morgan & Hunt, 1994) this distinction has never been conceptualized and tested. Interestingly in line with the international orientation of IJRM it investigates these constructs in two countries. We are confident that this paper has been used extensively in follow-up research to further understand customer- and channel relationships. Being on the forefront of the development of extensive research within relationship marketing this paper has heavily been cited. According to the Web of Science it received 143 cites, while Google Scholar registers 407 cites. This is by far the most cited of the nominated papers. We also believe that this paper will remain to have an enduring impact on the field given its important theoretical contributions.

Abstract of Geyskens et al (1996):

In recent years, interorganizational relationship management has become of paramount interest in marketing channels research. Marketing managers and researchers have identified mutual commitment among exchange partners in a marketing channel as central to successful relationship marketing and as key to producing significant benefits for firms. We consider two types of commitment that may characterize interfirm relationship. Affective commitment expresses the extent to which channel members like to maintain their relationship with specific partners. Calculative commitment measures the degree to which channel members experience the need to maintain a relationship. After conceptualizing commitment, we offer a set of hypotheses concerning the joint impact of trust and interdependence on both affective and calculative commitment. Testing our hypotheses in a field study involving two countries, we find strong evidence that total interdependence enhances both affective and calculative commitment. Which type of commitment develops depends on trust. The unexpected positive effect of interdependence asymmetry on affective commitment seems to be in line with a stream of research that has emphasized the positive role of power differences in promoting the effective coordination of channel relationships.

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