Quality Assessment of Business-to-Business (B2B) Relationships between SMEs: A Qualitative Approach Based on the Relational Capability Conception

Interorganizational cooperation and in particular dyadic relationships are increasingly considered as key factors for small-and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) business success in the ultra-competitive context of globalization. To support the development of successful relationships, this paper proposes a qualitative approach to assess the quality of business-to-business (B2B) between SMEs based on the Relational Capability framework proposed by Alves et al. (2016). The proposed approach is applied to a real relationship between two SMEs, to verify its applicability in order to understand whether the quality of the relationship has an impact on the success of jointly produced products. Experimental results suggest the possibility that the proposed method could be effective to assess quality of relations in interorganizational cooperation and that it can be useful to better analyze and understand the nature of relationships and to underline the aspects most related to power-dependence situations, which may compromise synergy between partners and negatively affect the success of the alliance.