cnfiguration theory assessment of the relationship performance

While many researchers have investigated the nature of Business Relationship, few contribution have been made to specify how firms optimally adopt alternative relationship strategies in dealing with their industrial counterpart. This paper delineate a framework to develop an understanding of how a firm’s performance is dependent upon its Business Relationship Management and its Business Strategy. This research is grounded on the concept of configuration theory and the logic of “profile deviation” from the concept of fit. This research aims to assess Business Relationship fit with Business strategy as the degree to which a business’s relationship strategies differ from those of ideal organization in terms of achieving higher performance for a given strategy type of a business. The paper meticulously reviews the literature on configuration theory, the concept of fit, different classification of business strategy, Business relationship portfolio and alternative approaches to measure performance by configuration theory. Upon this review of literature, a conceptual model is proposed and hypotheses are suggested. Furthermore, the analysis design with regard to the construct and fit operationalisation is discussed.

Keywords:

configuration theory , fit , business relationship , and business strategy