Value-creating relationships: focusing on the human level
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Value-creating relationships: focusing on the human level Alexander Bode • Katja Mu¨ller
Received: 30 October 2012 / Accepted: 26 June 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract Enhancing a firm’s value creation is one of today’s most discussed topics in management practice and science. Many approaches start by enhancing value creation while looking at operations and/or logistics of a firm, for example, a lean production. Furthermore, there is an increasing trend for cooperation. Close business-partner relationships are necessary while facing the challenges of changing business environments, inherent complexity, and dynamics of markets. We suggest that while the trade-off between competition and cooperation has to be decided on an organizational level, the individual level is crucial for value creation and success within cooperative forms of business. According to the call for micro-foundation, we will show how value creation can be improved within business-partner relationships by looking at the social behavior of individuals and human-level approaches. Accordingly, the overarching question in this paper is: Which models can be used for improving business-partner relationships aiming at an increasing value creation within cooperation. Answering this question, we consider peopleoriented management approaches as a basis for the emphasis of the human level within cooperation, arguing that social exchange theory can complement the existing resource-based and relational view. As a result, we develop a micro-foundation framework including humans and their individual assets, exchange resources, and characteristics of the relationships as impact factors for value-creating relationships. Based on this literature-based investigation,
A. Bode K. Mu¨ller (&) Technische Universita¨t Darmstadt, Hochschulstraße 1, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
we derive implications for further research and management practice. Keywords Business-partner relationships Value creation Micro-foundation Social exchange theory People orientation Resource-based and relational view
1 Introduction Creating value is undoubtedly one of the most important topics for strategic management. This is shown by classic management approaches like taylorism [1] or the human relation approach [2] but also by today’s management approaches like shareholder value [3] or lean management [4]. The analysis of 47 articles (see Appendix) published in four different high-ranked scientific management journals including the terms value added, value creation and/or creation of value published from 1990 to 2013 confirms the finding of Priem [5]. Priem surveys different value creation concepts used in literature: There is no general term for value creation used in literature, and sometimes definitions are missing entirely and are taken for granted [e.g., 6, 7]. According to the call for micro-foundation [8–11] that claims understanding human aspects within organizations in order to explain organizational m
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