Managing marketing relationships: Making sure everyone plays on the team

Much of the literature relating to managing marketing relationships focuses on limiting opportunistic activities by one or both partners in a relationship. Opportunistic behavior occurs when one partner seeks a short-term gain in a way that may damage the other partner or the relationship. In the case of a hotel belonging to a network or chain, such actions might include falsifying or suppressing monthly sales data. A study of over 400 individual hotels belonging to two hotel chains investigated the extent to which opportunism of individual hotels is limited by three governance mechanisms. Those mechanisms are (1) ownership by chain headquarters, (2) a hotel's investment in transaction-specific assets (e.g., reservation-system software), and (3) shared norms of relational exchange. Of the three, taken either singly or together, only the shared norms of relational exchange were at all effective in managing hotel opportunism. Hotel opportunism declined with higher degrees of relational exchange. Hotel opportunism was exacerbated, however, when ownership or investments in transaction-specific assets were emphasized as governance mechanisms.