The B2Com Relationship: An Empirical Study of the Measure of Relationship Quality in a Business-to-Community Relationship

The quality of relationship between Oil Producing Companies (OPC) and their Host Communities (HC) within the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria (NDRN) is a source of concern for different stakeholders such as the practitioners, government, communities, and OPC. Scholars in the field of marketing have studied relationship quality in different contexts, such as business-to-business, business-to-customer, customer-to-business, and interpersonal relationship. In this paper, the authors build on existing studies to develop a new relationship framework in a business-to-community (B2Com) context, intended to assess the degree of relationship quality between a business and its host community. The framework is supported by the results of a qualitative research study conducted using an in-depth semi-structured interview approach in exploring and assessing the various relationship elements and constructs impacting on the quality of a relationship developed between an OPC business and its host community in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. The findings showed that activity links, resources ties, actor bond, mutual benefit, communication, control mutuality, mutual goal and culture are the main antecedents of relationship quality, while trust, satisfaction, and commitment are the essential outcomes of relationship quality. The findings also showed that there is a linear relationship between trust, satisfaction and commitment.