Inter-organizational social capital as relationship investments. An empirical investigation of the effects on customers’ relationship satisfaction

Relationships in business markets have received considerable attention in marketing and strategy research which argues that buyers and sellers play important roles for the performance of each other. This literature suggests that business customers engage in closer relationships with their sellers mainly to manage uncertainty and dependence. In particular the construct of relationship satisfaction has been considered one of the most important outcome of buyer-seller relationships as an increased satisfaction of buyers and sellers entails high productivity facilitating the co-ordination of activities. Despite research typically considers satisfaction as a relational phenomenon, much of existing studies have focused on segmentation and measurement issues, suggesting that more interest should be placed on integrating this construct into the larger body of inter-organizational relationships theory. Within the network perspective, research about inter-organizational social capital has been embraced by management scholars as a theoretical basis for the analysis of potential antecedents of relationship satisfaction, according to the idea that social embedded structures can shape the strategic action in business markets. Although academics recognize the importance of inter-organizational social networks for relationship satisfaction, empirical evidence on the nature and the extent of this impact is still scarce. We conducted our research in the business-to-business setting of the retail apparel industry, and targeted the survey at business customers (i.e., buyers). By investigating seller–buyers relationships, we intend to explore both at theoretical and empirical levels the extent to which different dimensions of social capital – relational, cognitive and structural ones – can affect the customer’s perceived relationship satisfaction. The novelty of our conceptual approach resides in developing a framework where inter-organizational social capital is considered as a proxy of relationship investments, with the aim to integrate network theory studies with a strategic analysis of a relationship marketing construct (i.e., the relationship satisfaction). We build on the idea that a well developed inter-organizational social capital is more advantageous to reinforce buyers’ perceived satisfaction of their relationships in a setting characterized by a wide range of competing apparel companies, where buyers have to decide the right mix and quality of product categories and brands to sell in their stores. The main empirical contributions of our work show, on the one hand, the positive impact of both structural and cognitive dimensions of inter-organizational social capital on the relationship satisfaction and, on the other hand, a non significant impact of the relational dimension of social capital. Taken together these findings have several implications for theory and managerial practice in business-to-business markets. They highlight both the importance to adopt a contingent approach to assess the role of social capital for relationship satisfaction, and the need for further research on the extent to which the relational dimension could really improve buyers’ satisfaction.