An analysis of B2B relationship quality among Iranian managers: A comparison between Iranian and english managers

The purpose of this study is to understand the characteristics of relationship quality within a business-to-business (b2b) setting, and also to understand how these characteristics vary in importance between countries. Replicating an earlier study, conjoint analysis was used to study how a sample of 48 Iranian managers trade off different attributes of relationship quality. Overall, the most important attribute to the sample was profit, followed by trust and power. However, there was significant variance within the sample. When compared with an earlier study of UK managers in which an identical methodology was used, it was found that while profit was important for both groups, it was more so for Iranian managers. Trust was also important in both samples, in line with what was expected from the literature. Power was found to be important for Iranian managers whereas in the UK, power was reported as the least important attribute.