Governance of intercompany relations: contract, commitment, hierarchy and trus

Abstract

The objective of this work is to present and discuss appropriate theoretical-methodological apparatus to des- cribe and explain the dynamics of the management process relations among companies. It is an exploratory study, based on relevant literature review, where the four approaches related to making explicit the arrangement formats among companies – contract, commitment, trust-negotiation-reciprocity and hierarchy - are put in evi- dence. From an analytical point of view, differences are observed when explaining the parameters that delimit the coordination and alignment of actions by organizations involved in interorganizational arrangements. The nature of the environment that surrounds relations between companies opposes, on one side, the perspective of the contract, and on the other, the rest. For the first perspective, the contract constitutes a mechanism of sufficient coordination to designate a set of incentives that makes conflicting interests of agents compatible. For the other perspectives, the introduction of uncertainty leaves patent the impossibility of using the contract as a sufficient mechanism for agent coordination. In this sense, the perspectives of commitment, trust and hierarchy, when coming from the same decisive background, introduce additional parameters essential to the coordination of relations among companies. Keywords: Relations among companies; Mechanisms of coordination; Governance