Linking multi-component commitment to relationship value, trust, conflict and cooperation

This paper develops a conceptual model of business-to-business relationships that extends prior research. It incorporates a five-component structure of relationship commitment (value-based, affective, locked-in, obligation-based, and behavioural). It includes relationship value, contained in many existing models, in a novel way that links commitment to trust, switching costs, idiosyncratic investments, and cooperation. Four versions of the emerging conceptual model are developed to cope with the two/feedback links we include in the model to capture relational process as two-way links otherwise cannot be examined with structural equations modelling method. The paper concludes with preliminary results of the tests of the model(s).