Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale (HMCC)

1. Abstract

The Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale (HMCC) is a psychometric measurement instrument designed to assess the magnitude, frequency, and severity of lateral friction occurring among parallel sales channels within an organization’s multichannel distribution architecture. Developed and validated by Andreas Fürst, Martin Leimbach, and Jan-Karl Prigge in their seminal study on organizational multichannel differentiation (published in the Journal of Marketing, 2017), the instrument conceptualizes horizontal interchannel conflict as an overarching, manifest organizational condition defined by dispute frequency, emotional and operational intensity, and the substantive importance of underlying grievances. Comprising three parsimonious, highly saturated items rated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”), the scale captures lateral frictions that emerge when separate commercial routes to market—such as brick-and-mortar retail stores, direct e-commerce platforms, independent dealer networks, and direct sales forces—compete for overlapping customer segments, organizational resources, and transaction volumes.

Psychometrically, the HMCC demonstrates robust measurement integrity across empirical business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts. Confirmatory factor analyses reveal high item factor loadings, establishing strong convergent validity alongside unidimensional structural stability. Reliability assessments consistently confirm exceptional internal consistency, with composite reliability (CR) exceeding 0.85 and Cronbach’s alpha surpassing conventional psychometric thresholds. In empirical path models, the scale exhibits high criterion-related and nomological validity, negatively predicting channel relationship quality, channel alignment, and overall enterprise sales performance, while mediating the relationship between structural organizational differentiation and organizational outcomes. This profile establishes the HMCC as an indispensable diagnostic and empirical tool for marketing scientists, organizational behavior scholars, and supply chain strategists analyzing multichannel marketing management.

2. Keywords

Multichannel marketing, horizontal channel conflict, lateral conflict, interchannel disputes, distribution channels, channel relationship quality, sales channel management, psychometrics, organizational differentiation, channel governance, supply chain conflict, manifest conflict.

3. Authors

The Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale was operationalized and validated by a team of researchers in marketing strategy, sales governance, and business-to-business commerce:

• Andreas Fürst — Professor of Marketing and Chair of Marketing at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany. His research focuses on strategic marketing, sales management, multichannel distribution systems, and customer relationship management.
• Martin Leimbach — Scholar and management consultant specializing in multichannel architecture, corporate sales organization, and distribution strategy, affiliated with the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg during the development of the scale.
• Jan-Karl Prigge — Researcher and corporate practitioner specializing in organizational design, sales channel governance, and marketing interfaces, affiliated with the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

The foundational research was conducted under the auspices of the Chair of Marketing at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Lange Gasse 20, 90403 Nuremberg, Germany), published in collaboration with the American Marketing Association.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale is to evaluate the subjective and objective friction manifested among a firm’s co-existing sales channels. In contemporary commerce, firms rarely rely on a single path to market. Instead, modern corporations implement hybrid distribution frameworks, deploying concurrent channels such as company-owned flagship outlets, franchised brick-and-mortar stores, independent third-party retailers, proprietary digital e-commerce web shops, and third-party digital marketplaces. While this structural proliferation maximizes market coverage, enhances consumer convenience, and captures heterogeneous customer segments, it inevitably induces channel cannibalization, competitive territory encroachment, and resource competition.

Within strategic management and marketing literature, distinguishing between vertical conflict (disputes between upstream manufacturers and downstream intermediaries) and horizontal conflict (disputes among parallel entities occupying the same tier or serving the same consumer base on behalf of the same overarching firm) is vital. The HMCC was developed to provide a quantitatively rigorous, behaviorally anchored measurement tool targeting horizontal or lateral friction. It provides organizational leadership and academic researchers with empirical metrics to determine whether parallel sales avenues operate in collaborative synergy or devolve into dysfunctional, self-destructive infighting.

In applied organizational diagnostics, the scale functions as an early warning metric. Severe horizontal conflict frequently produces destructive commercial behaviors, including channel bypass, price undercutting, inventory hoarding, free-riding (e.g., consumers utilizing offline retail showrooms for tactile product evaluation before purchasing at discounted rates via digital channels), and the intentional sabotage of cross-channel marketing campaigns. By capturing conflict frequency, intensity, and importance, the HMCC enables enterprise managers to systematically evaluate whether initiatives such as organizational multichannel differentiation—encompassing cross-channel coordination committees, differentiated incentive structures, and segmented product portfolios—successfully mitigate or inadvertently exacerbate lateral tensions across the distribution network.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the HMCC is horizontal multichannel conflict, which sits at the intersection of organizational psychology, behavioral economics, and strategic marketing theory. Rather than viewing conflict merely as latent structural opposition or divergent goals, the HMCC captures manifest conflict—the overt, perceptible behavioral disputes, communicative clashes, and operational confrontations occurring between sales channel teams and managers.

Drawing upon classic behavioral channel theory, the construct encompasses three core interrelated dimensions:

• Dispute Frequency (Temporal Dimension): This dimension measures the recurrence and regularity of friction between parallel sales entities over operational cycles. High frequency reflects an ongoing, pervasive state of friction where day-to-day interactions are repeatedly stalled by jurisdictional boundary disputes, customer ownership claims, and commission allocation arguments. When dispute frequency is high, channel interaction becomes characterized by chronic suspicion and defensive posture rather than cooperative alignment.
• Dispute Intensity (Affective and Behavioral Severity Dimension): Frequency alone does not fully encapsulate the destructive capacity of conflict. A firm may experience frequent minor procedural disagreements that are resolved amicably without organizational impairment. The intensity dimension captures the emotional valence, acrimony, volatility, and behavioral escalation accompanying these disputes. Intense conflict manifests in hostile rhetoric between channel directors, aggressive price discounting to undercut peer channels, refusal to share actionable customer data, and active resistance to corporate omnichannel integration initiatives.
• Dispute Importance (Substantive Criticality Dimension): This dimension evaluates the organizational, operational, and strategic significance of the issues driving channel discord. Disagreements over trivial matters (e.g., minor brand style guidelines or peripheral promotional collateral) exert negligible structural influence. Conversely, disputes concerning core strategic issues—such as primary territory allocation, pricing parity policies, access to exclusive product inventory, and customer account ownership—pose existential threats to channel profitability. High scores on this dimension signify that channel peers perceive the focal disputes as directly impinging upon their operational survival, quota achievement, and revenue generation.

By integrating frequency, intensity, and importance into a singular psychometric assessment, the HMCC models horizontal channel conflict not as an ephemeral, isolated disagreement, but as an entrenched, dysfunctional systemic condition that directly undermines organizational cohesion and performance.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual underpinning of the Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale is rooted in Behavioral Channel Theory, initially articulated by Louis W. Stern, Adel I. El-Ansary, and Kenneth G. Hardy, which integrated social-psychological dynamics into classical economic models of distribution. Classical distribution economics assumed channels to be frictionless, rational mechanisms devoted solely to efficiency optimization. In contrast, behavioral channel theorists established that distribution networks are fundamentally social systems governed by power imbalances, role ambiguities, perceptual differences, and conflicting motivational structures.

Within this framework, the HMCC draws heavily from the conceptualization of conflict dynamics established by Pondy (1967), who delineated conflict into four developmental stages: latent conflict (underlying competition for scarce resources and role divergence), perceived conflict (cognitive awareness of divergent goals without affective hostility), felt conflict (affective states of tension, anxiety, and frustration), and manifest conflict (overt, observable disputatious behaviors, resistance, and hostility). The HMCC specifically measures the manifest stage of lateral conflict, capturing the observable behavioral outcomes resulting from latent structural tensions.

Furthermore, the scale’s theoretical foundation relies on Goal Incompatibility Theory and Domain Consensus Theory. Within a multichannel enterprise, lateral conflict erupts when parallel sales channels operate under divergent incentive mechanisms or lack a mutual consensus regarding domain boundaries. A domain specifies the target market, customer segments, product categories, and marketing functions allocated to a specific channel. When organizational differentiation between channels is ambiguous, domains overlap, producing territorial encroachment. According to social exchange theory, channel personnel who perceive their revenue base to be cannibalized by an internal peer channel experience feelings of distributive injustice, triggering manifest retaliation and defensive hostility. Fürst et al. (2017) formalized these theoretical interactions by establishing that horizontal conflict operates as a critical intervening variable between organizational multichannel structural design (differentiation across goals, systems, culture, and processes) and overarching firm sales performance.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale has been empirically substantiated using rigorous statistical methodologies across large-scale organizational samples. In the foundational validation by Fürst, Leimbach, and Prigge (2017), the scale was administered to a cross-industry sample of senior executives, marketing directors, and sales managers responsible for multi-tier channel architectures in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business environments.

• Content and Face Validity: Initial item development drew extensively upon established conflict literature in marketing and organizational sociology (e.g., Brown & Day, 1981; Stern & Gorman, 1969). The items were evaluated and refined through pre-testing with academic panels and senior distribution executives to verify that the phrasing accurately reflected the nuances of modern digital and physical multichannel environments.
• Construct and Convergent Validity: Structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated high standardized factor loadings for all three items (well exceeding the conservative 0.70 benchmark, typically ranging from 0.78 to 0.89). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) substantially surpassed the established 0.50 threshold, establishing that the underlying construct accounts for the majority of variance observed across the individual indicators.
• Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity was assessed utilizing the Fornell–Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT). The square root of the AVE for the HMCC exceeded the inter-construct correlations between the scale and related organizational constructs, including vertical channel conflict, organizational differentiation, cross-channel synergy, and channel relationship quality. HTMT values were uniformly below the stringent 0.85 threshold, proving empirical distinctiveness from adjacent organizational friction variables.
• Nomological and Criterion Validity: Nomological network testing confirmed established theoretical hypotheses. The HMCC demonstrated statistically significant negative associations with channel relationship quality, multi-unit trust, and objective corporate sales success. Furthermore, it mediated the relationship between poor structural differentiation and decreased company financial performance, corroborating its predictive and criterion-related utility.

8. Reliability

The Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale demonstrates exceptional reliability across diverse empirical contexts. Because the scale uses three focused indicators that directly capture the frequency, intensity, and importance dimensions of manifest friction, random measurement error is substantially minimized while retaining scale parsimony.

In the primary empirical investigation conducted by Fürst et al. (2017), reliability metrics consistently exceeded standard psychometric guidelines for organizational research:

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha): The scale achieved a Cronbach’s alpha value of α = 0.84, significantly surpassing the conventional 0.70 cut-off recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994) for basic research, as well as the 0.80 benchmark for mature applied instrumentation.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Recognizing the limitations of Cronbach’s alpha in structural equation modeling due to the assumption of tau-equivalence, composite reliability was evaluated. The scale demonstrated a CR of 0.85, confirming superior latent variance capture relative to error variance.
• Item-to-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for each of the three manifest indicators were uniformly high (> 0.65), verifying that every individual question contributed robustly to the core horizontal conflict latent variable without item redundancy.

Subsequent replications in supply chain, retail management, and digital transformation studies have reported comparable internal consistency coefficients (typically ranging from α = 0.81 to 0.88), indicating that the HMCC retains temporal and contextual measurement stability across diverse commercial settings.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensionality and structural integrity of the HMCC have been rigorously analyzed through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis

Initial factor extractions utilizing principal component analysis and maximum likelihood estimation with varimax/promax rotations consistently yield a single, unrotated factor with an eigenvalue substantially exceeding the Kaiser-Guttman criterion of 1.0. This single dominant factor typically accounts for more than 70% of the total item variance, with no secondary factors exhibiting eigenvalues above 0.5. These results provide conclusive evidence for the unidimensionality of the three-item instrument, demonstrating that dispute frequency, intensity, and importance converge empirically into a unified latent construct.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

When evaluated within complete structural equation models in CFA, the HMCC exhibits exceptional global fit indices. Because a three-indicator single-factor model is saturated (just-identified) when evaluated in isolation (degrees of freedom = 0), fit statistics are evaluated within multi-construct measurement models including horizontal conflict, vertical conflict, differentiation strategies, and company sales metrics. Within these global measurement models, fit indices uniformly meet or exceed strict methodological thresholds:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently exceed 0.96 (often > 0.98), indicating outstanding fit relative to the baseline null model.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Coefficients regularly surpass 0.95, confirming robust specification.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates remain below 0.05 (with 90% confidence intervals bounded within 0.00 to 0.07), reflecting minimal approximation error.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values are consistently below 0.04, well within the recommended 0.08 benchmark.

Standardized factor loadings (λ) for the individual indicators are uniformly significant (p < 0.001):

• Disputes occur frequently: λ ≈ 0.82
• Disputes are intense: λ ≈ 0.86
• Reasons for disputes are important: λ ≈ 0.79

These loadings verify that each indicator acts as a highly reliable marker of lateral interchannel discord.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale is a concise, highly standardized organizational survey instrument. Key specifications of the tool include:

• Construct Measured: Manifest horizontal multichannel conflict (frequency, intensity, and importance of lateral disputes among peer sales channels).
• Target Informants: Sales vice presidents, chief commercial officers, channel managers, retail directors, e-commerce leads, and corporate strategists familiar with lateral channel operations.
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or online psychometric questionnaire; suitable for single-informant or multi-informant (e.g., cross-channel dyadic) research designs.
• Total Number of Items: 3 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree
• Scoring Methodology: No reverse scoring is required. The overall Horizontal Multichannel Conflict score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean across the three items:

  HMCC Score = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3

  Higher aggregate scores reflect greater horizontal conflict, systemic discord, and operational friction between parallel sales channels.

• Estimated Completion Time: Under 2 minutes, enabling seamless inclusion in extensive strategic enterprise surveys without contributing to survey fatigue.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Horizontal Multichannel Conflict Scale was formally published in 2017 in the Journal of Marketing. The scale was established as an academic research instrument to advance the empirical literature on multichannel marketing systems, corporate governance, and inter-organizational relationships.

Licensing and Usage: The scale items and psychometric properties are published within the public academic record. Researchers, university faculty, and non-commercial investigators may utilize the instrument without direct licensing fees for academic, non-commercial research purposes, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to the original authors (Fürst et al., 2017) and the Journal of Marketing.

For proprietary commercial deployment, enterprise diagnostics, management consulting interventions, or software integration, practitioners should verify intellectual property conditions and copyright policies governed by the publisher (American Marketing Association / SAGE Publications) and seek authorization where commercial redistribution is intended.

12. References

• Brown, J. R., & Day, R. L. (1981). Measures of manifest conflict in distribution channels. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(3), 263–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800301
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Fürst, A., Leimbach, M., & Prigge, J.-K. (2017). Organizational multichannel differentiation: An analysis of its impact on channel relationships and company sales success. Journal of Marketing, 81(1), 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0215
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Pondy, L. R. (1967). Organizational conflict: Concepts and models. Administrative Science Quarterly, 12(2), 296–320. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391553
• Stern, L. W., & El-Ansary, A. I. (1992). Marketing channels (4th ed.). Prentice Hall.
• Stern, L. W., & Gorman, R. H. (1969). Conflict in distribution channels: An exploration. In L. W. Stern (Ed.), Distribution channels: Behavioral dimensions (pp. 156–175). Houghton Mifflin.
• Webb, K. L. (2002). Managing channels of distribution in the age of electronic commerce. Industrial Marketing Management, 31(2), 95–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0019-8501(01)00181-X

13. Items of the Scale