Antecedents and Consequences of Infidelity in Cross-Border Business Relationships

Abstract

The volatile, complex, and distant nature of the international business environment inevitably gives rise to incidences of infidelity among interacting exporters and importers. The authors propose and test a theoretically anchored model of the antecedents and consequences of infidelity in exporter-importer (E-I) working relationships. The findings confirm that importer's infidelity incidences are higher in those cases where trust, satisfaction, commitment, and cooperation are low in the relationship. In fact, the association between poor relationship quality and infidelity becomes stronger when the relationship is at a declining stage and is relatively young. The existence of infidelity in the relationship will lead to either punitive actions or reassessment measures on the part of the exporter, which are moderated by the degree of long-term orientation and social bonding that exists between the interacting parties. KeywordsExporting; exporter-importer relationships; infidelity; relationship quality. 2 Infidelity has often been described as one of the darkest sides of inter-firm business relationships and the worst form of betrayal, mainly because it can have destructive consequences on the smooth development and even the mere existence of a relationship (Shackelford and Buss 1996). In a dyadic relationship, infidelity represents a partner's violation of the rules, norms, and expectations regulating the relationship with the other party by seeking an illegitimate, parallel collaboration with other partner(s) (Drigotas and Barta 2001). Infidelity is a specific form of opportunism where the interacting parties have an explicit or implicit contract of exclusivity, and then one of the parties violates that contract in order to reap the benefits of multiple partners (Weiser and Weigel 2014). It demonstrates that the offending party promotes its own interests and serves its own needs at the expense of the other party or the relationship as a whole (Fitness 2001). Infidelity provides a form of severe humiliation and devastation for the cheated party, mainly because the latter is treated in a dishonorable, disrespectful, and disloyal way by the offending partner (Rachman 2010).As opposed to other issues characterizing the dark side of inter-firm relationship atmosphere, like coercive power, conflict, and relationship termination, that have attracted a lot of research, infidelity has received scant attention. However, this is surprising because infidelity is a key construct that has deleterious effects in the relationship and can reduce relational performance (Leonidou et al. 2014). This is because: (a) due to the limited resources of the firm, it is impossible for any existing business relationship not to be affected by a new parallel relationship; (b) social bonds are broken, because emotionally the boundary spanners are hurt; (c) tangible and intangible resources invested to the relationship cannot be taken back and can even be disseminated to competitors; (d) conflict is provoked as a result of dealing with...

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P4: The structural and relational dimensions of interpersonal social networks present also a “dark side,” which influences negatively the exploration/exploitation of opportunities abroad, as well as the path and the performance of the internationalization processes of traditional SMEs.

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Power source drivers and performance outcomes of functional and dysfunctional conflict in exporter–importer relationships

“…More specifically, this research focuses on the presence of conflict in exporter-importer relationships and investigates its power source-related drivers and performance outcomes. In contrast to relationships in the domestic market, international business associations are influenced by the different operating environments of the exchange partners typically characterized by differences in economic, political, regulatory, and socio-cultural factors, competitive forces, business practices, market characteristics, and customer behavior between home and host markets (e.g., Durand, Turkina, & Robson, 2016;Leonidou, Aykol, Fotiadis, & Christodoulides, 2017). Therefore, building and managing business relationships with trading partners in foreign markets is a more challenging task than buyer-seller relationships in the domestic market and, in turn, makes the study of drivers and performance outcomes of conflict in a cross-border dyadic context a particularly interesting issue for investigation.…”