Emerging relationships: How are they born?

During the last thirty years, IMP researchers have greatly improved our understanding of business relationships. However, the question of how a business relationship emerges has only aroused a small amount of interest. To bridge this gap, this paper tackles the subject of the 'birth' of business relationships. It sets out to contribute to our understanding of a relevant phenomenon - the initiation of business relationships - by building a conceptual framework. Relationship Emerging Flow, the conceptual framework used in this paper, is based on an analysis of the IMP and relationship marketing approaches to relationship stages, the relationship-forming literature of inter-organizational relationship studies and the related part of trust literature. It is also nurtured by case study-based empirical evidence. The conceptual framework deals with both the individual and organizational levels and includes consideration of trigger issues and the existence of different trust building scenarios in whole bonding trust. The emergence of a new business relationship is a result of a complex interactive process. In this paper we examine only the first stage: the birth of a new relationship. This spans the period from a starting situation in which potential partners have no knowledge of each other to the creation of the conditions for building a relationship. Trigger issues are important factors in the parties' awareness and initiation. Interaction processes, moderated by trust-building scenarios, create the conditions that allow actors to keep on building relationships. To illustrate the different steps of this flow and to identify the trigger issues we supply examples of various emerging business relationships at a large Hungarian industrial firm called Videoton. In addition to the construction of the Relationship Emerging Framework the novelty of our approach is that, unlike the vast majority of research on trust, we study the period of bonding trust that leads to the relationship rather than that which already exists in a relationship. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.