Inertia, boredom, and complacency in business-to-business relationships: Identifying and interpreting antecedents and manifestations

While opportunism, a ‘dark side’ construct, has been discussed at length, inertia, boredom, and complacency, have received less attention. This is surprising given their detrimental effect on relationships. This study identifies antecedents and manifestations of the constructs and discusses strategies for suppressing their emergence. We identify cognitive fatigue and positive reinforcement as antecedents of inertia; routine, formalization, instruction ambiguity, and self-concept incompatibility of boredom; and excessive self-efficacy and relationship continuity of complacency. Manifestations include response invariability, consensus seeking, shallow task engagement, reduced effort, and reduced attentiveness. In the context of resource deployment, we show that, whereas complacency is the result of self-serving resource restriction, boredom and inertia result from involuntary, or well-intentioned, resource restriction. We demonstrate the importance of understanding construct antecedents because, while the consequence of all three is underperformance, strategies for suppressing them vary because of the diverse range of antecedents and their resource deployment implications.