Paper info

The Mediating Effects of Dyadic Relational Drivers in a Business-To-Business Buyer Network

Elsamari Botha, Gert Human and Pete Naude

The paper was published at the 27th IMP-conference in Glasgow, Scotland in 2011.

In business-to-business research, loyalty and satisfaction attract considerable attention, but
despite the myriad of conceptualisations and approaches, a stable theoretical platform that
links these different constructs is still not agreed upon. Yet, securing loyalty via customer
satisfaction is often a critical component of many business strategies, because obtaining new
customers is perceived as expensive while customer retention is generally associated with
long-term profitability. Our explorative study in the context of an emerging market
empirically supports the notion that satisfaction leads to loyalty and this relationship
ultimately drives attitudinal loyalty. Consistent with recent findings we hypothesize that trust,
commitment and information sharing mediates the relationship between satisfaction and
attitudinal loyalty. Our study employed a focal firm approach to consider a network of buyers
in the South African CAD industry. Data was collected from 526 respondents and the
empirical model was tested using variance based Structural Equation Modelling. Our results
show that the relationship between relationship satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty is fully
mediated by trust and commitment. We also observed a significant positive association
between attitudinal loyalty and information sharing, while commitment partially mediates the
relationships between information sharing and attitudinal loyalty. The findings provide
researchers and practitioners with insights into the effective management of buyer-supplier
relationships in an emerging market context. It also fills a critical gap in emerging market
literature.
Keywords: Business-to-Business Relationships, Satisfaction, Trust, Commitment,
Information Sharing, Loyalty.