Skin in the game - B2B relationship recovery as emotional journeys

Abstract

Despite decades of research focused on business-to-business (B2B) relationships, the processes of severe conflict resolution and relationship recovery remain under-researched. Moreover, the few existing B2B relationship recovery models focus on actions and how these actions transform the uncoupling processes into recovery processes for the relationship. Yet it is not only the actions that form the recovery process, but also how participants evaluate and respond to the actions. Such evaluations are emotions, in other words, adaptive responses to important events, which direct the participants' attention and prepare them for subsequent actions. The actions, emotions, and reactions form the sub-processes of B2B relationship recovery. Hence, to understand the B2B relationship recovery process, we need to study and understand both the actions and the emotions that are interwoven within those actions in the recovery sub-processes Prevailing research helps us to understand emotions at ‘a point in time’ or as isolated reactions to individual triggers. To understand how a lengthy B2B relationship recovery occurs and how to act during it, processual research is needed. and in contrast to a static view, we use a processual perspective to study emotions in recovery processes.

This exploratory study uses abductive reasoning and narrative interviews of owners and managers in small B2B firms. As a result of the abductive reasoning, this study builds an ordering theory of B2B relationship recovery, presenting a categorisation of seven emotional journeys, connected to three types of relationship outcomes, namely recovered, repaired and vulnerable. We build on IMP-inspired research on B2B relationships, with the help of the Appraisal theory and Emotion-as-Social-Information theory, both of which have been applied in earlier research on emotions in a B2B context.