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Do formal contracts and relational governance function as substitutes or complements?

Poppo, Laura, Zenger, Todd·2002·Strategic Management Journal

Abstract

Relational exchange arrangements supported by trust are commonly viewed as substitutes for complex contracts in interorganizational exchanges. Many argue that formal contracts actually undermine trust and thereby encourage the opportunistic behavior they are designed to discourage. In this paper, we develop and test an alternative perspective: that formal contracts and relational governance function as complements. Using data from a sample of information service exchanges, we find empirical support for this proposition of complementarity. Managers appear to couple their increasingly customized contracts with high levels of relational governance (and vice versa). Moreover, this interdependence underlies their ability to generate improvements in exchange performance. Our results concerning the determinants of these governance choices show their distinct origins, which further augments their complementarity in practice. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Metadata

Authors
Poppo, L., & Zenger, T.
Venue
Strategic Management Journal
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2002-05
Volume
23
Issue
8
Pages
707-725
ISSN
  • 0143-2095 (ISSN-L)
  • 1097-0266
OpenAlex
W2151388372
Cited by
3,652
References
7
FWCI
74.85
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Do formal contracts and relational governance function as substitutes or complements? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/smj.249
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Poppo, L., & Zenger, T. (2002). Do formal contracts and relational governance function as substitutes or complements? Strategic Management Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.249

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.