The Use of Accommodation in Buyer–Seller Relationships: Encouraging or Controlling Opportunism in Business Markets Middle-grounds

ABSTRACT

Purpose: In the past decades, marketing researchers have explored different strategies to control opportunism in buyer–seller relationships. Accommodation, the cooperative response to partners’ exploitive behavior in exchange relationships, has received increasing attention from research on interfirm relationships. However, less is known about whether accommodation is an effective response strategy for controlling opportunism. Drawing on the self-enforcing agreement literature, this article focuses on exploring (1) what drives a firm’s accommodation response to its partner’s exploitive behavior, (2) how a firm’s accommodation helps govern its exchange partner’s opportunistic behavior, and (3) whether monitoring magnifies or buffers the effect of accommodation on the exchange partners’ opportunism.

Methodology: The survey data were collected from 173 seller-firms in Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, and Zhengzhou, representing the south, east, north, and middle regions of China. The initial questionnaires were distributed mainly by mail. By assessing the nonresponse bias and the potential bias of early and late responses, we detected no significant differences, implying that the aforementioned biases are not a concern. Because PLS can readily model both formative and reflective constructs, and accommodation is a formative construct, we deployed the SmartPLS software program to test our model.

Findings: This article enables a deeper understanding of accommodation as a response strategy in buyer–seller relationships. The data analysis offers supportive evidence that a firm’s level of accommodation is positively related to two exchange attributes: joint-specific investments and observability of the exchanges. Accommodation, as a cooperative response strategy, curtails opportunism in buyer–seller relationships, and such a curtailing role is magnified when accompanied with monitoring.

Originality/value/contribution: The authors develop a framework to examine previously untested relationships, which suggest accommodation is a cooperative response strategy to mitigate opportunism. We also contribute by exploring the antecedents of accommodation from the tangible transaction attributes perspective. Specifically, two exchange attributes, joint-specific investments and observability, can explain the emergence of accommodation. In addition, we examine the combined effect of competitive response strategies and cooperative response strategies on controlling partner opportunism. That is, competitive response strategies (i.e., monitoring) strengthen the governing effect of cooperative response strategies (i.e., accommodation).     

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This study contributes to the growing interest in how hybrid organizations manage paradoxical social–business tensions. Our empirical case is “impact sourcing”—hybrids in global supply chains that hire staff from disadvantaged communities to provide services to business clients. We identify two major growth orientations—“community-focused” and “client-focused” growth—their inherent tensions and ways that hybrids manage them. The former favors slow growth and manages tensions through highly integrated client and community relations; the latter promotes faster growth and manages client and community relations separately. Both growth orientations address social–business tensions in particular ways, but also create latent constraints that manifest when entrepreneurial aspirations conflict with the current growth path. In presenting and discussing our findings, we introduce preempting management practices of tensions, and the importance of geographic embeddedness and distance to the paradox literature.     

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