The awareness-motivation-capability approach to the cooperation relationships between franchisers and franchisees: The case of laundry business franchise system

Adopting the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) approach to advancing the understanding of franchiser-franchisee (F-F) relationships, this study explores the competitive dynamics of franchising relationships in service business from franchisees´ perspective. Most of previous research in this line use resource scarcity and agency theory from franchisers´ point of view. We propose that the overall performance of a franchising service business is well connected with the cooperative quality of F-F relationships, which in turn are highly influenced by the awareness, motivation, and capability of franchisees. From an in-depth field investigation of a renowned laundry-service of 25 franchisees for 18 months, we identified five categories of franchisees resulted from different degrees of AMC. Our results show that adaptive managerial systems and productive interaction are keys to coping with five types of good F-F relationships. We systematically identify the five types in our results.