This study investigates the effects of franchisors' characteristics including brand reputation, training and product related support, franchisees' characteristics including store location and management on the performance and recontract intention of franchisees in bakery franchise industry. Also, this study examine the moderating effect of CEO experience of franchisees among the franchisors' and franchisees' characteristics, and performance. To empirically test these relationships, data were collected from 386 respondents who are franchisees in the bakery franchise sector. In the verification of hypotheses, the structure equation modeling(SEM) is used. The results of this study are as follows. First, franchisors' brand reputation, training support, and franchisees' locational factor have significant effects on the financial performance of franchisees positively. However, franchisors' product related support and franchisees' management of the store have not significant effects on the performance. Second, the performance of franchisees has positive effect on the recontract intention. Third, the moderating effect of CEO experience is only significant in the relationship between franchisors' training support and the performance. Based on the findings, this study suggest the importance of building a good brand image and superior training system for franchisors to improve mutual ongoing growth. Also, franchisors should determine whether nascent franchisee entrepreneurs have CEO experiences to further improve performance. If they do not have related experiences, both opening and ongoing training supports of franchisors and the efforts of franchisees towards learning are required. Finally, this study suggest that both franchisors and franchisees should accurately analyze the conditions of possible locations and establish strategies to select beneficial location before starting a franchise business.
This study was conducted to establish a comprehensive guideline for grading system of poultry meat cuts. Slaughter and further processed houses were divided into large(>70,000 heads/day), middle(
As the social economy emerges as one of the alternatives for solving social problems, interest and experiments on social franchise, a methodology for scaling the social economy, continue to increase. The success or failure of social franchise has a huge impact on franchisors, members of franchisees, as well as beneficiaries, local residents, and stakeholders in the region, but research on ways to increase their chances of success is still insufficient. Based on previous studies, this study tried to derive success factors by analyzing the effects of social franchise characteristics on business performance, and to understand the mediating effect of franchise autonomy, which is the differentiation point of social franchises, between characteristic factors and business performance. Social value orientation, social economy experience, local network utilization, and customer orientation were derived as characteristic factors affecting business performance, and franchise autonomy was set as a mediating variable, and a survey was conducted for franchisee members and their influence was analyzed. Through this study, it was found that social economy experience and local network utilization had a positive (+) effect on economic performance, and social value orientation, local network utilization, and customer orientation had a positive (+) effect on social performance. Also, the results of franchise autonomy playing a mediating role between social economy experience, local network utilization and economic performance, and a mediating role between local network utilization and social performance were presented. This study has significance as the first study to conduct a full-scale empirical study on social franchises. It is hoped that theoretical research on social franchises will be more active in the future and will be used as a useful reference for performance creation for organizations that seek or already operate social franchises.
The Freedom of Information System has been introduced into the society based on the Fair Trade Transactions Act, which was established by Fair Trade Commission (FTC) on May, 2002. However, the system itself has showed limitations in guaranteeing a reliability and transparency of the disclosure document. Thus, since February, 2008, FTC not only made franchisors to register disclosure documents but also adopted the Disclosure Document Registration System, which forced them to provide registered disclosure documents to franchise applicants and franchisee. Franchisors consider the newly adopted Disclosure Document Registration System a restrictive system. However, considering the recent trend of fast growing franchising industry and the importance of being competitive, franchisors need to utilize the disclosure documents to promote their business and to gain trusts from franchise applicants by providing truthful information. In that way, franchisors will be able to establish a foundation that franchising industry might be successful and reduce the agency fee by cutting out conflicts with franchisees. Thus, this study aims to study the ways of effective preparation of disclosure document and its utilization from a franchisor viewpoint.
Franchising is one of the fastest growing types of business. It is already popular and well-known in the U.S., and has been growing in many other countries including Korea. Furthermore, many Korean franchising companies have expanded their business overseas actively. According to the data by the Ministry of Industry and Resource, 82 companies out of a sample of 500 franchising companies are already operating in many foreign countries and 48% of them have started their foreign business since 2006. This clearly indicates the fast growing current trend of foreign operation by Korean franchising companies. In spite of the fast growing trend of foreign expansion in the industry, academic research on internationalization of franchising companies is extremely difficult to find. Accordingly, academic research on the issue is necessary and urgent in Korea. Among the various research questions on internationalization of franchising business, this study intends to investigate the difference in organizational factors between the franchising companies doing foreign operation and those doing business only domestically. More specifically, this research has the following purposes. First, considering the lack of theoretical basis of previous studies, resource-based theory and agency theory are employed as the theoretical bases. Second, this study explains the difference in internationalization based on organizational factors such as company size, history and growth rate. Third, the five hypotheses regarding the difference in organizational factors are presented and tested empirically, which is the first attempt in the area of this topic. Finally, the study attempts to clarify the conflicting implications among theories regarding some organizational factos such as growth rate. As the theoretical background, resource-based theory and agency theory are discussed. According to resource-based theory, a firm can grow continuously when it has competence and resource, and also the ability to develop them. The competence and resource can include capital, human resource, management skill, market information, ability to manage risk, etc. Meanwhile, agency theory views the relationship between franchisor and franchisee as an agency relationship. In agency theory, bonding capability and monitoring capability are the two key factors which promote internationalization of franchising companies. Based on the two theories, a conceptual model is designed. The model consists of two groups of variables. One is organizational factors including size, history, growth rate, price bonding and geographic dispersion. The other is whether a franchising company is operating overseas or not. We developed the following five research hypotheses basically describing the relationship between organizational factors and internationalization of franchising companies. H1: The size of franchising companies operating overseas is larger than that of franchising companies operating domestically. H2: The history of franchising companies operating overseas is longer than that of franchising companies operating domestically. H3: The growth rate of franchising companies operating overseas is higher than that of franchising companies operating domestically. H4: The price bonding of franchising companies operating overseas is higher than that of franchising companies operating domestically. H5: The geographic dispersion of franchising companies operating overseas is wider than that of franchising companies operating domestically. Data for the analyses are obtained from 2005 Korea Franchise Survey data co-generated by Ministry of Industry and Resource, GS1 Korea, and Korea Franchise Association. Out of 2,804 population companies, 2,489 companies are excluded for various reasons and 315 companies are selected as the final sample. Prior to hypotheses tests, validity and reliability of the measures of size, history, growth rate and price bonding are examined for further analyses. Geographic dispersion is not validated since it is measured using nominal data. A series of independent sample T-tests is used to find out whether there exists any significant difference between the companies internationalized and those operating only domestically for each organizational factor. Among the five factors, size and geographic dispersion show significant difference, growth rate and price bonding do not reveal any difference and, finally, history factor shows conflicting results in the difference depending on how to measure it.