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1. Introduction
Business relationships indisputably constitute the fabric of every economy. In management and marketing studies, business relationships are considered organisational resources crucial for competitive advantage and success (Morgan and Hunt, 1994; Biggemann and Buttle, 2005; Shaladi, 2012). Their importance has increased over the last few decades due to economic, social and political changes such as globalisation, market fragmentation and increased customer expectations (Håkansson and Snehota, 1995; Ford et al., 1998; Tuten and Urban, 2001; Parker, 2005; Sudolska, 2011). Research into how to build (and throughout this paper we use the word “build” in the general sense, not referring to any specific stage of the process) high-quality business relationships has therefore become crucial, because both customers and business partners are increasingly more demanding and expect more satisfaction and value in exchange processes.
Considering the above, we intend to identify the activities and resources used by relationship actors to establish, develop and maintain high-quality business relationships based on interpersonal bonds. We regard this aim as a response to a research gap we have identified in management studies. Notably, we see that, while the dominating notion of the nature of B2B relationships highlights the importance of partners’ interpersonal bonds (Håkansson and Snehota, 1995; Ford et al., 2003; Mitręga et al., 2011; Akrout, 2014), theoretical frameworks do not explain their character or categorise the activities and resources used at successive stages of relationship-building to enhance such bonds. At the same time, a selection of those activities and resources may be derived from cross-cultural analyses, particularly from a proposition by Gesteland (2012), who identified the dimension of the deal-focused (DF) vs relationship-focused (RF) approach to business relationships.
We considered Gesteland’s concept worth adopting in B2B relationship analysis for two main reasons. First, his framework is one of very few cultural concepts that refer directly to business relationships. Most of the cultural models indicate dimensions that influence B2B relationships through their impact on somewhat general concepts of business behaviours, e.g. attitude to power (Hofstede, 1991; Schwartz, 1992; Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1997; Solomon and Schell, 2009). Second, the dimension of the DF vs RF approach proposed by Gesteland identifies specific activities and resources used by companies building their external relations and relates those activities and resources to the...