توابع روابط تامین کنندگان صنعتی و تاثیر آنها بر کیفیت ارتباط

Although recent scholarly work on business relationships often discusses relationship quality as a major issue, especially with regard to the phenomenon of vendor stratification, there is still little empirical research on this important construct. In this paper, the authors provide a thorough conceptualization of relationship quality and its possible antecedents, i.e., the direct and indirect functions of the relationship for the customer. Drawing on an empirical base of 230 buyer questionnaires, the authors show that the extent to which a supplier fulfills direct and indirect functions in a relationship has a direct positive impact on the relationship quality perceived by the customer. This impact is especially strong when the customer can easily replace the supplier or, in other words, when the supplier faces competition. The findings are discussed and the authors provide managerial implications for decision-makers from both buyer and supplier organizations.

In business-to-business markets, long-term orientation has become one of the main issues in relationships between customers and their suppliers (e.g., [18], [24] and [37]). Durable relationships with selected suppliers are seen as sources of a stronger competitive position. Long-term relationships with suppliers enable firms to be more efficient in procurement as well as more effective in delivering quality and/or in reducing transaction costs [46]. As a consequence, companies are beginning to formally acknowledge and reward differences among their qualified suppliers in order to develop and sustain long-term, cooperative relationships [20]. To develop a set of relationships with qualified suppliers that strengthen the competitive position, customers must be able to recognize important differences between these suppliers. As a meaningful construct that captures integral features of a supplier relationship, the concept of relationship quality from a customer's perspective has received increasing attention by researchers during the past decade (e.g., [18], [39] and [40]). Dorsch et al. [20] found in their study that relationship quality can be used as a basis for the development and implementation of effective preferred supplier programs. Findings of Crosby et al. [18] suggest that a customer's perceived relationship quality contributes to a lasting bond with the supplier. Relationship quality is a higher-order construct often encompassing three distinct, although related dimensions of business relationships: trust, commitment and satisfaction [20]. The determination of relationship quality with a supplier is an important point when the customer decides about developing and maintaining a long-term relationship with this supplier or not. Given the variation in relationship quality an important question arises from a managerial perspective: What are the supplier's inputs that lead to a high relationship quality? In order to identify noticeable antecedents of relationship quality that allows industrial customers a more strategic management and selection of important supplier relationships, a functional view on relationships is helpful. Scholars already presented various approaches to describe relationship functions in business-to-business markets [2], [15] and [29]. In our study, we propose a concept of direct and indirect functions of supplier relationships and we analyze their impact on relationship quality. In Section 2, we will present our conceptualization of the major theoretical constructs of the study: direct and indirect functions in a supplier relationship, and relationship quality. Furthermore, we introduce the theoretical framework of the constructs and hypotheses. In Section 3, we will provide a description of the sample, the method and the outcomes of our empirical study. Finally, we discuss theoretical and managerial implications as well as limitations of our study.