Is partner knowledge equally important for businesses from post-communist countries? – comparative study of Polish and Slovenian companies

Business relationships are nowadays perceived as the factor of company’s success, but there is lack of international comparative studies with regard to effectiveness of relationship-based business resources. This study is oriented at minimizing this gap by comparing the effects of relational resources developed by companies based in two Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries: Poland and Slovenia. Specifically, this study focuses on the partner knowledge as a specific resource that companies from these two countries may use to manage relationships with various partners in the supply chain. The international survey we conducted illustrates that developing partner knowledge is associated significantly with high quality of customer relationships and indirectly with financial performance, which is not surprising because advanced partner knowledge helps in integrating supply chain towards providing superior value to the customers. However, our study contributes to the literature on partner knowledge by presenting some important country-related contingencies for this path and testing them empirically. Namely, our empirical study shows that Slovenian companies benefit more from partner knowledge than Polish companies. We explain this result through differences in socio-economic aspects of business environment that influence on networking by Polish and Slovenian companies. The managers may use our study as the motivation to enhance the scope of company databases and utilizing such enriched databases in business networking, especially in export markets.