Impact of the Internet on interorganizational relationships

Silvana Trimi (), Silvana Faja () and Shanggeun Rhee ()

Service Business, 2009, vol. 3, issue 1, 63-83

Abstract: The Internet brings enormous advantages to organizations in the forms of standardization, power of networks, and inexpensive operations. Past decade has seen an increase in cooperative relationships among organizations. Despite the acknowledgment of the impact of the Internet on interorganizational relationships (IORs), there is a paucity of empirical research in this area, particularly for service firms, with regard to their entire life cycle. Using a field-based survey, in cooperation with the Gallup Organization, this study empirically examines some of the effects of the Internet on different stages of the life cycle of IORs. Based on the data collected from 206 firms (majority small service firms with less than 500 employees), results of our study show that the Internet has effected every stage of IOR life cycle, has increased the frequency and opportunities to find new partners, has affected the selection criteria that they use finding to select new partners, has improved the quality of relationships with existing partners, and increased the partnership performance. These effects though were not the same for different types of partnerships. The research found that the Internet has had the greatest effect for medium-level integration types of partnerships, which include non-equity strategic alliances and networks. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2009

Keywords: Internet; Partnerships; Interorganizational relationships (IORs); IORs life cycle; Strategic alliances; IORs quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11628-008-0052-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:svcbiz:v:3:y:2009:i:1:p:63-83

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/business/journal/11628

DOI: 10.1007/s11628-008-0052-4

Access Statistics for this article

Service Business is currently edited by S.M. Lee and J. Millet Roig

More articles in Service Business from Springer, Pan-Pacific Business Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().