Buffering and Amplifying Effects of Relationship Commitment in Business-to-Business Relationships

Abstract

Using an assimilation and contrast framework, the authors assess the buffering and amplifying effects of relationship commitment on organizational buyers’ intentions to switch suppliers when a relationship is strained by the incumbent's own misbehavior. The results of three studies show that both calculative and affective commitment buffer incumbent suppliers against minor incidences of their own misbehavior but that affective commitment also reliably amplifies the adverse effects of an incumbent supplier's flagrant opportunism. Process tests indicate that buyer perceptions of supplier conformance to normative standards account for (completely mediate) the observed buffering and amplification effects in a manner consistent with the underlying assimilation and contrast framework.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 208 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.