Sustaining High-Performance Global Account Management : A Model and Test of a Global Change Capability
Type
doctoral thesis
Date Issued
2009
Author(s)
Abstract
For firms competing in high velocity business markets, global account management (GAM)-that is, a seller's initiative to centrally leverage its value creation and appropriation worldwide with its strategic customers-is an important matter. Generally, firms embark on GAM to accelerate their value creation and manage the associated risks with strategic global customers by building stronger seller-buyer relationships and taping into interfirm resources. When they attempt to implement GAM, firms often face significant challenges in bringing about sustainable change because the scope of change that GAM entails is underestimated. Hence, initiatives may run into severe and costly difficulties, ranging from (multiple) program relaunches to termination. Adopting a change management and capabilities perspective, the author first characterizes GAM initiatives and then develops a model that conceptualizes a firm's global change capability as a key determinant of GAM implementation success. The model emerges from multiyear case study research. The author then tests this model in a cross-industry survey of 154 multinational firms that have implemented GAM. The results support the conceptualization of a firm's global change capability (i.e., strategic alignment, top management engagement, reward alignment, resource securing, and conflict management) as a meta-capability that embeds GAM and increases program effectiveness and efficiency. From a theoretical standpoint, this study addresses implementation and change management as critical gaps, particularly in extant customer management literature, and contributes to broader marketing strategy literature that thus far has not explored strategic change in a global context sufficiently. From a practitioner's viewpoint, this study supports managerial decision making prior to GAM as well as during its implementation. The framework and many cases presented herein can help save firms from a journey into the unknown and assist them in developing and deploying critical change capabilities to embed cognitive, behavioral, and procedural changes in their organizations. Furthermore, the framework provides firms with a means to diagnose the degree to which they have institutionalized GAM and thus may sustain a well-performing program in the long run.
Language
English
Keywords
global account management
change
transformation
capability
capabilities
institutionalization
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
No
Publisher
NiedermannDruck AG
Publisher place
St.Gallen
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
58332