Voice in business-to-business relationships: Cost-of-exit and demographic antecedents

Because voice may play an important role in the maintenance of business-to-business relationships the paper investigates its antecedents. After summarizing what is known about voice in apr inter-firm context, the paper proposes that a firm's voice is affected by its cost to exit the relationship, its overall relationship satisfaction, and demographic variables. These proposals are tested in a field survey. While satisfaction and the cost to exit the relationship were stronger predictors of voice than the demographic variables, the results suggest that several partner firm demographic variables could be useful to relationship managers interested in the maintenance of business-to-business relationships via partner firm voice cultivation Because these demographic variables are less sensitive (ie., partner firms are likely to provide this information without insisting on their anonymity), they could be used to identify partner firms by name that are likely to be nonvocal when they are experiencing relationship problems.