Authors: Maria Holmlund-Rytkönen; Tore Strandvik
Business relationships are constantly in potential change meaning that their strength may vary over time. One of the causes of change comes from incidents that deviate in a positive or negative way from the expected and normal relationship pattern. In this paper we introduce the concept of stress in business relationships which captures the effect of negative exceptional incidents, and present a technique, the Negative Critical Incident Mapping (NCIM), for measuring this kind of stress in business relationships. Besides exploring aspects constituting and increasing the strength of relationships, investigations should also be made into aspects decreasing their strength. Relationship stress is defined as the perceived cumulative effects of negative experiences in the business relationship. In this study stress is considered as one type of risk factor affecting the strength of the relationship. In a business relationship the buyer’s and the seller’s organisations are connected to each other on many levels. There are a number of relationships within the relationship. The technique proposed in this paper can, however, be used to reveal also internal differences in each counterpart’s perception of the relationship. Findings from using the NCIM technique in an industrial service and a business service setting are used to measure and illustrate stress in a dyadic manner. The results show that not only were all studied relationships burdened with stress to varying extent but there were also substantial differences in degree and content of stress. This means that relationships can have similar total stress value, but fundamentally different sources of stress. When seller-buyer pairs of stress perceptions were matched on different levels findings showed that operator-level perceptions of stress in the relationships corresponded better than manager-level perceptions. In conclusion the findings indicated that in the buyer’s view stress is related to relationship satisfaction, yet the seller did not seem to recognise this.Key words: business relationships, relationship stress, relationship strength, negative critical incidents, NCIM-technique
Journal: ( – )
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Publish Year: 2003
Conference: Lugano, Switzerland (2003)