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The Fit of Business Relationships with Business Strategies

The concept of strategic fit has been a focus of the contemporary literature on organisational behaviour and strategy. This concept follows the logic of contingency theory and suggests that where business strategy is aligned with organizational structures, such a Gestalt (i.e. the optimised organisational implementation characteristics) provides the greatest contribution to firm performance. In this study, we apply the concept of strategic fit to the characteristics of inter-firm relationships. A coalignment perspective invokes a configurational view on strategy vis-a-vis relationship characteristics by which we are able to explain (a) how firms with different business strategies adopt and implement alternative relationship strategies in dealing with their counterparts, and (b) how the interplay between business strategy and relationship strategy leads to firm performance as well as relationship performance. Results of our empirical analysis with 195 international managers confirm the existence of an ideal relational configuration profile for each business strategy type. A profile deviation analysis indicates that the more similar configurations of business relationship characteristics are to those of the top performing companies for their given business strategy type, the higher is both their relationship performance as well as their firm’s overall performance. We further test ideal single-firm versus multiple-firm benchmarking of deriving ideal configurations for our deviation study; however, results indicate no significant improve in explaining performance by single-firm operationalization. Furthermore, we tested the deviation logic against a fit conceptualization as covariation, which examines the impact of the internal consistency regarding aligning a company’s relationship characteristics with business strategy to achieve superior relationship performance. Overall, the results provide support that the higher-order coalignment model as used by fit as covariation analyses is the preferred model specification.