Conflict and performance in channels: a meta-analysis

Conflict between channel members is of great interest to marketers given its presumed negative impact on the channel’s business performance. In a comprehensive meta-analysis of the empirical literature spanning six decades between 1960 and 2020, we observe channel performance is indeed negatively linked to channel conflict. However, we find that this conflict–performance link has evolved significantly over time, roughly in keeping with the growth and maturing of e-commerce technologies. Further, the damage caused by conflict appears to be more pronounced for channels with international operations, and for channels with greater dependency between channel members. Additionally, businesses in North America seem to suffer the consequences of channel conflict more than others. Our results also show several study characteristics related to measurement and sampling significantly impact the empirical conflict–performance links reported in the literature. We base our conclusions on correlational analyses, two-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling (TSSEM), and meta-analytic regression analyses (MARA). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11747-020-00751-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.