Undesirable events in Norwegian-Brazilian Business Relationships – An exploratory study of governance mechanisms as an underlying force

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is first and foremost to investigate and identify perceptual distances on undesired events in Norwegian-Brazilian business dyads, and to understand their underlying forces with regards to informal and formal governance mechanisms. The data collection took place as a field study in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. It involved Norwegian companies operating in Brazil, and their Brazilian counterparts. The thesis builds upon, and use the construct created in Prof. Terje I. Vålands dissertation from 2002. He looked at the role informal and formal governance mechanisms had, in understanding interorganizational conflicts in the oil industry. We conducted a sequential exploratory mixed method approach with an experimental design. And interviewed informants on both sides of a dyad as our main source of data. We interviewed all participants two times. The first was to uncover the undesirable events in the relationship. The second interview’s purpose was to have the informants express, through a rating of the events, whether they considered the events to take place due to either lack of formal or informal mechanisms. These findings are used alongside existing theory to explain our findings. We also scratch the surface by asking them how they consider impact (importance) of an event in relation to the governance mechanisms. Our sample consists of three dyads. Two complex and one owner-operator relationship. The findings show, that for the complex dyads, there seems to be a mutual understanding towards the events resulting from lack of formal governance. For our less complex owner-operator dyad, we found an imbalance in the answers, where the informants had perceived the same undesirable events opposite of one another.