Relationship Quality in Business to Business Relationships – Reviewing the Current Literatures and Proposing a New Measurement Model

Relationship quality is a central theme in business to business relationships, and it is becoming increasingly important from a theoretical as well as practical perspective to understand and monitor relationship quality. Despite its pivotal role, measurement issues of relationship quality have not been systematically investigated, confounded by a lack of consensus on the dimensions and contents of this construct. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the measures of relationship quality, and proposes the CLOSES scale as a new monitoring tool. This higher-order, multidimensional scale reflects the intensity of communication (C), long-term orientation (LO), and social and economic satisfaction (SES) of a focal actor in a business relationship. Tested with data collected from 404 construction companies and cross-checked with a second round of data collection from 201 companies in other various industries, using partially multiple respondents, this new scale shows good reliability, convergent, discriminant and nomological validity, as well as cross-industry transferability. Thus, future academic research as well as practical management of business relationships is enriched by providing a valid and reliable tool that is not tied to a specific industry setting, to capture the important construct of relationship quality.