The maturity of relationship management and firm performance – A step toward relationship management middle-range theory

A relationship approach to business is well recognized by both academia and business practitioners. Though a superficial understanding of this concept makes it hard to separate firms which are truly relationship-oriented from those, which only declare relationships as their priority, while being prevailingly transaction-oriented. Consequently, the correlation between the relationship approach and firm performance is studied in the absence of a relationship management maturity definition of what undermines the plausibility of this concept. This paper seeks to close this gap. A multistep statistical analysis, including association rules and frequent itemsets mining, was applied to effectively analyze the 608-strong sample of Polish companies. As a result, the paper develops a workable definition of corporate relationship management maturity, based on the evidence of top performing companies and it quotes the key business practices, which indicate a truly relationship-oriented company. Thus this paper contributes to the development of relationship management middle-range theory.