Eye for an eye: Examining retaliation in business-to-business relationships
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to examine why a buying firm in a marketing channel may retaliate against its supplier. The objective of this paper is thus to understand the individual and organizational variables that may prompt a buying company to retaliate against its supplier following negative critical incidents (NCI).
Design/methodology/approach
Data was collected from 171 retailers associated with one focal manufacturer and analyzed through PLS path modeling procedures.
Findings
Results demonstrate that retaliation is the outcome of individual factors related to a buyer's cognitive (causal attributions) and emotional (anger) processes triggered by NCI as well as organizational forces (trust and dependence) related to more stable characteristics of the interfirm relationship.
Originality/value
Compared with existing contributions, the proposed model adopts a multilevel approach and considers retaliation as the outcome of individual as well as organizational forces. On the individual level, echoing the rapidly growing idea that emotions, not just cognitions, are a relevant object of study within interorganizational relationships, this paper empirically investigates the effect of one negative emotion (anger) and of causal attributions in buyer-seller partnerships. On the organizational level, this research examines the influence of trust and dependence, two central variables in business-to-business marketing theory, which seem closely related to retaliation.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper was submitted while the author was working as an Assistant Professor at Inseec Business School Paris.
Citation
Vidal, D. (2014), "Eye for an eye: Examining retaliation in business-to-business relationships", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 48 No. 1/2, pp. 47-67. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-03-2011-0173
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited