Three essays on asymmetric perceptions in interorganizational relationships

Abstract

Interorganizational relationships involve different organizations to interact with each other. During the interaction process, it is likely that exchange parties have divergent perceptions in regard to the specific relationship. In contrast to mutual perceptions, such asymmetry constitutes significant challenges for interfirm partners to cooperate and well manage their relationships. Despite its importance, the topic of asymmetric perceptions in interorganizational relationships is under-investigated. As an endeavor to advance the research, the thesis consists of three essays to look into the roles of asymmetric perceptions in dyadic buyer–supplier exchanges from different aspects. As an initial effort, the first essay looks into trust incongruence and examines its performance impacts in buyer–supplier exchanges, with the prediction that increasing trust incongruence leads to a decrease of supplier performance over time when buyers trust more than suppliers. Moreover, such negative effect on changes in supplier performance becomes more severe at high levels of buyer asset specificity asymmetry and supply market uncertainty. The results from a longitudinal survey of 230 buyer–supplier dyads provide strong support for these propositions. These findings provide fresh insights on the dyadic and asymmetric view of trust and offer important implications for firms to manage their exchange relationships. Following the first essay, the second essay examines institutional antecedents of trust asymmetry in international interfirm exchanges. Because international buyers and suppliers differ widely in their institutional backgrounds, institutional distance, namely formal (i.e., legal/political) and informal (i.e., cultural) distance, likely exerts significant impacts on trust asymmetry between foreign and local partners. With 134 international buyer–supplier relationships, we first empirically examine that both calculative trust asymmetry and relational trust asymmetry show negative influences on exchange performance, and then find that while formal distance constrains calculative trust asymmetry, informal distance increases relational trust asymmetry. Moreover, prior interaction and expectation of continuity play significant moderating roles for the influences of formal and informal distance. The study advances cross-border research on interorganizational trust. The third essay investigates how the asymmetric degrees of perceived fairness between exchange parties shape governance mechanisms. By explicating the differential impacts of fairness asymmetry on changes in trust and explicit contracts over time, the study adopts a dyadic perspective to enrich understanding about the implications of fairness for formal and informal governance mechanisms in interorganizational relationships. With a two-wave longitudinal sample of 229 buyer–supplier dyads, the results show that over time, fairness asymmetry leads to decrease of shared trust and increase of explicit contracts. Our research findings also reveal that both market uncertainty and behavioral uncertainty make the negative effect of fairness asymmetry on shared trust more adverse. Moreover, market uncertainty enhances the role of fairness asymmetry in promoting explicit contracts.