earticle

영어

Relationship quality between a franchisor and its franchisees is the most important element of any successful business. The purpose of this study is to understand the factors that increase franchisee's relationship commitment toward their franchisor. We hypothesized that relationship commitment is effected by the amount of initial investment, length of business, supporting services from franchisor, and two-way communication while those relationships are mediated by trust toward franchisor (either trust on competency or trust on integrity). An empirical study was conducted by interviewing 300 franchisees in Korea and a total of 257 responses were used for our final analysis. The result of structural equation model analysis showed that the proposed predictors, except for length of business, significantly increased relationship commitment through trust toward franchisor. Relationship commitment had a positive relationship with relationship satisfaction. The explanatory power of our research model was pretty high explaining 60% variances of relationship commitment and 73% variances of relationship satisfaction.