Assessments of equivocal salesperson behavior and their influences on the quality of buyer-seller relationships

Abstract

In buyer-supplier relationships, salespeople engage in behaviors that buyers may (or may not) view as deceptive. Despite the salesperson’s underlying miscreant or innocent motives, buyers have a difficult time attributing the intentionality of salesperson behaviors after the fact. While extant research has explicated various governance mechanisms to mitigate the occurrence of opportunistic behaviors a priori, scholarship is not as well-versed in understanding (a) the relational factors that influence the buyer’s interpretation of debatably opportunistic salesperson behaviors and (b) the buyer’s retributive response within the ongoing relationship. To bring clarity to these issues, the authors examine relationship factors that influence the likelihood of perceived salesperson opportunism following equivocal salesperson acts. Utilizing data from industrial buyers in the U.S. healthcare industry, this study shows that buyer specific investments are related positively to attributions of salesperson guile, whereas contractual agreements are related negatively to attributions of guile. Relationship solidarity moderates these effects. Further, we find that attributions of salesperson guile lead to perceived salesperson opportunism, which in turn results in buyers lowering their expectations of relationship continuity and increasing their retributive responses. We corroborate these findings with cross-sectional survey data from a sample of industrial buyers. Collectively, these findings hold implications with regard to the role of the buyer’s attribution of salesperson guile for a specific behavior as a determinant of perceived opportunism in general, while also outlining conditions under which buyers are inclined to engage in retributive opportunism.

Keywords:

• Buyer-Seller relationships
• opportunism
• attribution
• retribution
• transaction costs economics

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One possible explanation for this unexpected finding is that buyers would not put themselves in a precarious situation unless the supplier would not/could not exploit their dependence. Buyers, for example, may have offsetting investments to balance their dependence on their suppliers (Heide and John 1988), therein lowering their expectations of opportunism and their attributions of guile.

2 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.