The Relevance Of Macneil'S Relational Norms To Understand The Exit Of A Interorganizational Relationship

Relationship marketing has been gaining an increasing interest in the marketing community for the past ten years. Some authors define relationship building and management as the core of the marketing process (Grönroos, 1994), others view it as a way to build up effective competitive advantages especially when potential for differentiation is weak, such as in services (e.g., Day, 2000). Although the volume of conceptual and empirical researches on relationship marketing is impressive, few attempts have been made to explain the dissolution of a relationship (Dwyer et al., 1987; Stewart, 1998; Tähtinen, 1999). Unfortunately a marketing relationship cannot be defined as an ever-ending love story! The objective of this paper is to test the relevance of a conceptual framework to understand this dissolution process: the relational norms. It has been originally developed by Macneil to understand legal contracts (Macneil, 1980). According to Macneil, there exists a set of transactional as well as relational norms to understand an economic exchange between two partners. The former include nine contractual norms, the latter encompasses four relational norms, namely role integrity, solidarity, flexibility and supra contractual norms. This set of relational norms has been successfully used to explain the effectiveness of marketing relationships (e.g., Paulin, Perrien & Ferguson, 1997). In this research we intended to test if these relational norms can be applied to explain a dissolution process. Thirteen dyads of account managers and managers of businesses in the mid-market were interviewed. These interviews showed the contingency of Macneil's norms. They also demonstrated the major role played by relational norms both in developing and maintaining and in deteriorating and ending a relationship. Based on this qualitative phase, a questionnaire was developed. Doing so, we empirically test the relevance of relational norms in explaining relationship termination on a sample of 98 small businesses.