Impact of Inter-firm Relationship Fairness in Strategic Alliance on Relationship Commitment -- Mediating Effects of Inter-firm Trust

Yizhen WU, Zhiwei WU, Ying CHEN

Abstract


As one of the core influencing factors of inter-firm relationship, relationship commitment has an important effect on the continuity of the inter-firm cooperative relationship and the enhancement of cooperative performance. By selecting 230 enterprises in Jiangsu as the study samples, collecting data through questionnaires and using an intermediary model, the impact imposed by inter-firm relationship fairness on the relationship commitment is studied and the mediating effect of inter-firm trust is testified in this paper. The results show that a route by which the relationship fairness affects the relationship commitment does exist in the sector of inter-firm cooperative relationship in China. Among them, distributive fairness can not only promote affective commitment directly, but also in the meantime bring in an indirect effect on the affective commitment through talent trust, while procedural fairness imposes positive impacts on affective commitment mainly by talent trust, the mediating variable. Besides, the improvement of interaction fairness can directly reduce the level of inter-firm calculative commitment on the one hand, and meanwhile helps to improve the inter-firm benevolent trust level and indirectly affects the calculative commitment on the other hand.

Key words: Relationship fairness; Relationship commitment; Inter-firm trust; Mediating effect


Keywords


Relationship fairness; Relationship commitment; Inter-firm trust; Mediating effect

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/j.css.1923669720120804.z0520

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