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Business partnerships require long-term commitment

Forming and maintaining a successful business partnership requires considerable commitment by both business partners. Like ‘marriage’, there must be tangible signs of long-term commitment by devoting financial and other resources to help the business relationship (Kanter 1994).

Commitment suggests a future orientation in which business partners attempt to build a business relationship that can weather unanticipated problems (Spekman and Mohr 1994, Cummings 1984). Committed business partners demonstrate a willingness to exert effort on behalf of the relationship. A high level of commitment provides the context in which both business partners can achieve individual and joint goals without raising the spectre of opportunistic behaviour (Cummings 1984). Buckley and Casson (1988) similarly suggest that successful business alliances require partners who can practice mutual forbearance, i.e. they must be willing to forgo short-run opportunistic actions in the interest of maintaining the business relationship, which they expect will yield long-term benefits. Angle and Perry (1981) and Roessl (2005) share the same view but do not discard the importance of the short term. They argue that business alliance partners must be able to balance short-term problems with long-term goal achievement. This requires considerable commitment, which, according to Angle and Perry, is positively correlated with business partnership success.

One way of measuring commitment is to consider it in terms of the investments made by the business partners in terms of both money and time (Anderson and Weitz 1992).