Paper info: Perceived justice and business relationships: the case of the iranian car industry
Title
Perceived justice and business relationships: the case of the iranian car industry
Authors
Ghasem Zaefarian, Stephan Henneberg,
Pete Naude
and Zhaleh Najafi Tavani
Pete Naude
Manchester Business School
United Kingdom
Place of Publication
The paper was published at the 28th IMP-conference in Rome, Italy in 2012.
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Abstract
Business relationships are at the core of research in the IMP tradition. Based on the interaction model (Ford & Hakansson, 2006) and the ARA model (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995), there have been many studies examining different aspects of business relationships. However, theories regarding perceptions of justice have not been widely used to gain a better understanding of interactions between interdependent firms. This is somewhat astonishing as justice perceptions relate to manifold aspects of business interactions, e.g. social, procedural, or outcome aspects. Therefore this research study is aimed at investigating the role of procedural, distributive, interactional justice (Homburg & Fürst, 2005), on certain inter-firm relationship characteristics including interpersonal trust, interorganisational trust, commitment and long-term orientations. We further examine the impact of these relationship characteristics on the level of sales volume as well as sales growth over a period of three years. In doing this research, we surveyed a total of 212 suppliers of one the main automobile maker in Iran in time t1. We managed to get data from two key-informants in 110 suppliers. We then collected objective data on the sales volume that these suppliers have had with the car manufacturer in three consequent years t1, t2, and t3. The results of data analysis indicate that none of the relationship characteristics had impact on the sales level. We also found that for those suppliers that are highly dependent to the car manufacturer, none of the relationship characteristics had impact on the sales growth. However, for those suppliers that are not highly dependent to the car manufacturer, all of the four relationship characteristics significantly explain the growth in the sales level.