Cross-border relationships and performance: Revisiting a complex linkage — A commentary essay

Obadia and Vida (2010) extend a prominent theme in the export performance literature, by explicitly addressing “importer role performance.” The commentary essay here builds on a significant volume of work dealing with behavioral dimensions in cross-border exchange relationship management, and points at contributions and shortcomings of Obadia and Vida's paper in terms of advancing and upgrading discussions in this area. This commentary concludes that scholars need to concentrate their future research efforts in linking the relationship dimension and export performance on introducing more comprehensive sets of mediating and moderating effects. These sets of effects may include dimensions such as opportunism, foreign market knowledge and competence, conflict reduction, commitment enhancement, partner interaction, knowledge sharing and ICT.