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Abstract
Commitment is vital in inter-organizational relationships. It is important to understand what drives commitment which then affects the relationship between organizations. Commitment is a multidimensional construct and its dimensions can be broadly categorized into attitudinal and behavioural perspectives. In conventional practice, commitment researchers have tended to focus on the attitudinal perspective, while the behavioural perspective is largely ignored. In an attempt to buck that conventional trend commitment research is proposed along the unconventional but widely accepted as important behavioural perspective, building up a more complete understanding of the importance of behavioural commitment, as well as developing and validating a theoretical model that depicts precisely the relationship between behavioural commitment and its key driving factors. Accordingly a large-scale questionnaire survey has been conducted in the UK construction industry and 636 responses were collected. Structural equation modelling was then used to test the theoretical model. Results validate trust, reliance and dependence as the major antecedents of behavioural commitment. A new direction in commitment research adds new findings to the current body of commitment literature.
Notes
1. In Hypothesis 1 and indeed throughout the whole paper, the words ‘buyer’ and ‘supplier’ do not have to refer to an individual. Either of these two words can denote a group of individuals.
2. SCM is concerned with how firms can utilize their chain partners’ processes, technology and capacity in order to strengthen their competitiveness (Houlihan, Citation1985; Cooper and Ellram Citation1993; Department of Trade and Industry, Citation1995).