International business‐relationship triads

This paper addresses the question of whether the dyadic approach to international business relationships should, in some situations, be extended to a triadic one. In studies of business relationships the common view is that the relationship consists of two parties, one selling party and one buying party. However, in some, especially international business relationships an intermediary exists that has contact with both the selling party and the buying party, at the same time as the selling party and the buying party also have direct contact with each other, i.e. these relationships are triadic by nature. The purpose here is to investigate whether a triadic approach should be used in these types of situations. The empirical analysis is based on a subset of the database established within the IMP2‐project. The analysis of the data material was done using LISREL. Trust and commitment, two central concepts in studies within the field of business‐to‐business research, are used to investigate whether business‐relationship triads are different from business‐relationship dyads. The results indicate that this is very much the case.