Inertia, boredom, and complacency in business-to-business relationships: Identifying and interpreting antecedents and manifestations

Mario Vafeas and Tim Hughes

Journal of Business Research, 2021, vol. 130, issue C, 210-220

Abstract: While opportunism, a ‘dark side’ construct, has been discussed at length, inertia, boredom, and complacency, have received less attention. This is surprising given their detrimental effect on relationships. This study identifies antecedents and manifestations of the constructs and discusses strategies for suppressing their emergence. We identify cognitive fatigue and positive reinforcement as antecedents of inertia; routine, formalization, instruction ambiguity, and self-concept incompatibility of boredom; and excessive self-efficacy and relationship continuity of complacency. Manifestations include response invariability, consensus seeking, shallow task engagement, reduced effort, and reduced attentiveness. In the context of resource deployment, we show that, whereas complacency is the result of self-serving resource restriction, boredom and inertia result from involuntary, or well-intentioned, resource restriction. We demonstrate the importance of understanding construct antecedents because, while the consequence of all three is underperformance, strategies for suppressing them vary because of the diverse range of antecedents and their resource deployment implications.

Keywords: Dark side; Relationships; Business-to-business; Inertia; Boredom; Complacency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296321002022
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:130:y:2021:i:c:p:210-220

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.03.038

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().