Abstract
As business continues to globalize, firms are increasingly looking to international business partnerships (IBP) as a means of expanding and competing in new markets. However, many of these partnerships fail. The causes of these failures have often been attributed to managers' inability to form and maintain successful relationships with their partners at an interpersonal level. The extant research in business-to-business relationships has largely focused on the firm-to-firm level and the macroenvironment of these firms. We extend this stream of research to the interpersonal level by introducing the concept of relational competence from social psychology and linking it to existing relationship marketing constructs. We build our theory from a case study research methodology using a “discovery-mode; multicountry” approach. This research yields theoretical insights from an extensive qualitative study of successful IBP in four countries—Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The degrees-of-freedom analysis (DFA) technique was used on the case data. The result is a theoretical framework for examining the impact of manager's relational competence on relationship performance, mediated by interpersonal relationship quality and communication behavior.