As franchising has increased its visibility and impact on the business landscape, it has attracted the attention of a wide variety of researchers from different academic backgrounds. We draw together much of this research by juxtaposing the two key theories used to explain franchising, resource scarcity and agency theory, with the empirical findings regarding three key franchising constructs—franchise initiation, subsequent propensity to franchise, and franchise performance. We suggest that research emphasis needs to shift toward understanding why firms initiate franchising and how franchising impacts different types of organizational performance. We also find that extant research can benefit from additional theoretical diversity and thus we offer new propositions grounded in three theories not yet widely applied to franchising.

The antecedents of victim willingness to reconcile a professional relationship following an incident involving a broken promise were examined in terms of offender tactics (i.e., nature of apology, timeliness of reparative act, sincerity) and relationship characteristics (i.e., nature of past relationship, probability of future violation) using a within- and between-subjects policy-capturing design. Relatively speaking, relationship characteristics were as strongly related to willingness to reconcile as offender tactics. Furthermore, we found moderating effects of magnitude of violation on the willingness to reconcile a relationship following a trust violation. In particular, nature of past relationship was weighed more heavily, whereas probability of future violation was weighed less heavily when the magnitude of the violation was greater. Practical implications and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Social loafing was investigated by testing a multilevel model among 23 intact work groups comprised of 168 employees representing two organizations. Results demonstrated that as hypothesized at the individual level, increases in task interdependence and decreases in task visibility and distributive justice were associated with greater occurrence of social loafing. At the group level, increased group size and decreased cohesiveness were related to increased levels of social loafing. Of particular interest was the finding that group member perceptions of perceived coworker loafing was associated with reduced social loafing, opposite of our predictions. We suggested that this unexpected finding may provide evidence of a social compensation effect.