The Relational View: Future challenges for a non-confirmed expectation/Visao relacional: desafios futuros para uma expectativa nao confirmada/Vision relacional: retos futuros para una expectativa no confirmada.

AutorTescari, Fabio Campos

1 Introduction

The relational view, proposed in the seminal paper by Dyer and Singh (1998), is an important derivation of the resource-based view (RBV) (Acedo, Barroso, & Galan, 2006). In the RBV, the resources controlled by firms are the focus of analysis and are the source of performance heterogeneity and of competitive advantage itself. Because of this, a significant number of studies on supply chain management use the RBV combined with relational perspectives, especially those that focus on buyer-supplier relationships (Hitt, Xu, & Carnes, 2016).

In turn, the relational view (RV) proposes that the resources that are found at the interface of the relationship between firms and that are created and shared can also have these effects. Given the emergence and increasing importance of the resource-based view, the relational view proposal was of great appeal to academics who study the relationship between firms and who, until then, had been restricted to other dominant theoretical approaches that focused on minimizing costs. The new theoretical view enabled this advance when it explained value creation (Zajac & Olsen, 1993) and made a connection in this context between relationships and the competitive advantage of the firms involved in them (Kozlenkova, Samaha, & Palmatier, 2014). Currently, the emphasis on value creation is also a consistent approach with the management of relational transactions embedded in the shared economy, which are not directly monetized. Value, therefore, becomes a relevant variable vis-a-vis the traditional performance-based approach.

One indication of the applicability of the relational view is the large number of articles citing the seminal article by Dyer and Singh. According to the Web of Science, there were 2,359 citations between 1998 and 2016, of which 286 were published in the last year. Among recent studies, some of the authors cite the article to indicate that relationships are sources of competitive advantage (Huemer, 2014; Li, Jiang, Pei, & Jiang, 2017), while others cite it to highlight the generation of specific relationship assets (Zacharias, Nijssen, & Stock, 2016) and to emphasize that collaborative relationships contribute towards minimizing transaction costs (Abdi & Aulakh, 2017; Proch, Worthmann, & Schluchtermann, 2017).

Despite this apparent theoretical potential, however, the relational view has not yet been consolidated as a dominant theoretical framework and much of its initial empirical support, which was heavily based on the works of Jeffrey Dyer and his colleagues (Dyer, 1997; Dyer & Hatch, 2006; Dyer & Singh, 1998; Dyer, Singh, & Kale, 2008), was not confirmed in later works, which ended up using variations of the initial

theoretical structure. Considering the four constructs of the relational view, which are called relational resources, their concomitant use is rare. There are, however, some authors who use some of them (e.g., Chen, Preston, & Xia, 2013), there are models that test some of them as antecedents (e.g., Hernandez-Espallardo, Rodriguez-Orejuela, & Sanchez-Perez, 2010), and there are articles that operationalize constructs using different relational resource indicators (Liu, Luo, & Liu, 2009; Narasimhan & Nair, 2005), or that define specific relationships between the constructs (Hoetker & Mellewigt, 2009). When Deboca and Martins (2015) carried out their qualitative study, they found no evidence of relational view constructs in their analysis of inter-organizational relationships in two furniture centers.

In this article, we propose testing the relational view in its original theoretical structure, by analyzing the impact of the four relational resources on the economic value creation in relationships between buyers and suppliers. The model we used is an extension of the restricted concept of economic value created by a firm, as proposed by Brandenburger and Stuart (1996) and adopted as the basis for the current definition of competitive advantage in strategy (Adner & Zemsky, 2006; Brito & Brito, 2012; Peteraf & Barney, 2003). It also allows us to evaluate the impact of relational resources on both sides of the dyad, since part of the value created is captured by the supplier, while another part is captured by the buyer. The study also makes contributions by introducing context variables that can moderate the effect of relational resources in an initiative to try and elucidate their lack of concomitance in empirically tested models. The intention, therefore, is to offer a contribution that will lead to more in-depth academic-scientific discussions about the relational view.

To meet the proposed objectives, a survey was conducted, with 121 responses being obtained from companies that supply chemical products and that have operations in Brazil. The multiple regression method was used to test the effect of the four relational resources (independent variables), the two context variables (uncertainty and competition), and the eight interactions between resources and context variables in value creation, which in turn was operationalized by way of three different dependent variables (value created for the supplier, value created for the buyer, and value coming from the relationship), with a regression for each dependent variable.

The structure of this article comprises four more sections besides this one. The theoretical section discusses value creation in relationships and the theoretical approaches used by studies into such relationships, besides presenting the proposed model and its hypotheses. The third section presents the methodological procedures used in the research, while the fourth gives the results and discusses them. The conclusions section deals with future challenges for the development of the relational view based on the results obtained, emphasizing the contributions made by the research and its limitations.

2 Literature review

This section discusses the broader scope of the relational view of strategy when analyzing value creation in relationships. We also present the theoretical foundations of the constructs that form the basis of the proposed model and the hypotheses constructed to analyze the relationship between relational view constructs (called relational resources) and value creation.

2.1 Theoretical approaches in relationship studies

Transaction cost theory (TCE) and the relational view (RV) are among the main theoretical perspectives used in interorganizational relationship studies (Burgess, Singh, & Koroglu, 2006; Hitt, Xu, & Carnes, 2016).

TCE emphasizes the search for efficiency that guides the expansion of a firm to the limit of acquiring a product or service in the market that it can produce or perform (Coase, 1937). In borderline situations, firms create governance mechanisms that lead to a configuration that results in lower transaction costs, which can range from market-oriented structures with no integration to full vertical integration (hierarchies). Between these extremes, hybrid, partial integration structures may be adopted by way of long-term contracts (Williamson, 2008).

Dyer and Singh (1998) are the key authors with writings on RV, which is an extension of the resource-based view (RBV). RBV considers that the competitive advantage of companies comes from their own attributes, called resources. For a firm to obtain competitive advantage the resources it has at its disposal must be valuable and rare and competitors must find them inimitable and non-substitutable (Barney & Clark, 2007). Dyer and Singh (1998) took the view that peer companies or a network of companies may develop relationships that result in sustainable competitive advantage. Relationships between firms allow for the exploration of synergies and the development of activities that lead to relational rent being obtained. Relational rents are additional profits that a firm derives from a relationship, which might not be generated in isolation, and which are considered to be transaction value. The party with the rarest or scarcest resource in the relationship should capture more relational rents (Dyer & Singh, 1998).

In short, TCE addresses the question of costs in quite a comprehensive manner, but from a unilateral perspective that ignores the interdependence between the firms involved in a relationship, as well as limiting adherence to interorganizational strategy issues (Zajac & Olsen, 1993). RV is broader in scope and considers not only cost reduction but also the increase in customer willingness to pay as opportunities for creating superior value. There are, however, differences regarding the operationalization of RV constructs, since the use of models that simultaneously consider its four constructs is rare in the literature. Our proposal in this study was to test the four RV constructs separately as sources of value in a relationship, with the intention of contributing to the discussion about their parsimony and validity.

2.2 Relational resources

In their seminal article on the relational view, Dyer and Singh (1998) point out that the relationship between firms is a unit of analysis that is suitable for understanding the competitive advantage that accrues from obtaining relational rents. Relationships with other firms, combined with own resources, bring greater rents than the individual result. In this approach, the authors identify four interorganizational resources (relational resources) that are sources of these relational rents: relation-specific assets, knowledge sharing routines, complementary resources, and relational governance. These resources are examined in detail and the authors identify isolated subprocesses and mechanisms for preserving relational rents.

Asset-specificity comes from investments that are exclusively ear-marked for the partner in a relationship, with the expectation of obtaining mutual benefits and the development of competences that depend on the duration of the safeguards and the volume of...

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