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Abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Literature review

۳٫ Data and research methodology

۴٫ Results and discussion

۵٫ Conclusions and limitations

Declaration of competing interest

Acknowledgements

Appendix.

References

Abstract

This research seeks to discover how the organisational form (franchising vs. vertical integration) of 305 supermarkets belonging to a Spanish franchise chain influences unit-level performance measured through three key performance indicators commonly used in the retail literature: sales per square metre, sales per employee, and service quality scores. Additionally, we assess the moderating role of the manager’s gender in each individual supermarket. We have analysed the research questions using multivariate analyses, with a panel dataset that includes quarterly establishment-level data covering the period from January 2017 to December 2019. We have found that franchised supermarkets record higher sales both per square metre and per employee than vertically integrated ones. This positive effect of franchising is lower in establishments run by females than in those run by males. The findings also reveal that franchised supermarkets record lower service quality scores than their company-owned counterparts, and this negative effect is again lower in establishments managed by females than in those managed by males.

۱٫ Introduction

The coexistence of franchised and vertically integrated establishments in the same chain is a major topic for researchers studying entrepreneurship and small business management (Brand and Croonen, 2010). At network level, scholars have analysed the synergies between franchised and vertically integrated outlets in the same chain (Bradach, 1997, 1998), while at establishment level they have examined the performance differences between franchised and company-owned outlets, with mixed findings (Kosová et al., 2013; Shelton, 1967; Vázquez-Suárez et al., 2020). One of the goals of research in this field is to discover whether one of these two organisational choices outperforms the other. This is a key issue, as whatever influences a business’s performance also affects its efficiency and long-term survival. In this study, we contend that the gender of each individual outlet’s manager may shed some light on these relationships.

Nothing has been published on the differences between franchising and company ownership in terms of establishment-level performance in the supermarket industry. Moreover, no articles have thus far been published on gender’s moderating role in the relationship between the organisational form of individual establishments and their performance in franchise chains, although females’ move into management positions is now a major academic and practical research stream that is attracting a great deal of attention. There are myriad instances of research that have already used a range of measures to investigate gender differences in business performance, including earnings, turnover, and business failures (Marco, 2012; Menicucci et al., 2019; Robb and Watson, 2012), but no one has addressed gender and business performance in the supermarket industry. There are even inconsistent findings on this issue in other industries, as we shall see in due course.