Overseas exporter fairness and Korean importer’s commitment

Purpose – Importer commitment is important to the improvement of exporter performance. More committed importers contribute more to the exporters’ performance than do less committed importers. The purpose of this paper is to examine one of the factors that motivate importers to be committed to their overseas exporters: exporter fairness. Specifically, this study examines the role of exporter fairness in developing importer commitment. Fairness is conceptualized as three dimensions: distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice. Design/methodology/approach – The relationship between the three dimensions of exporter fairness and importer commitment is empirically examined using data collected from 120 Korean importers. Partial least squares technique was employed to test the hypotheses. Findings – It was found that importers’ perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice contribute to increasing or decreasing importer commitment. Furthermore, when a sample of Korean importers was split into two groups, the three dimensions of justice were positively related to commitment for importers facing a highly volatile business environment, while only interactional justice significantly affected commitment for importers facing a low-volatile environment. These findings indicate that importers facing a highly volatile environment are much more sensitive to exporter fairness than are those facing a low-volatile environment. Originality/value – The study demonstrates that importer commitment can be developed, particularly in highly volatile environments, if vulnerable importers are treated fairly by their more powerful exporters. Volatile environments offer more opportunity for overseas exporter opportunism than stable environments do, aking importers vulnerable to the opportunistic behaviors of overseas exporters. Such importers are likely to respond sensitively to exporter fairness in the form of increased or decreased importer commitment.