Start Making Sense Again - Business Relationship Restoration After Severe Norm Violation Episodes

Relational norms provide behavioural guidelines for individual actors interacting in business relationships. Frequently, norms are violated and the involved actors initiate a normalisation process to restore exchange order. However, in rare instances violations occur with a severity where the exchange cannot be normalised by the means available in the interpersonal relationship. In some of these severe violation episodes, dissolution is not an option due to high perceived dependence. In this paper, the authors report on an investigation of three such severe norm violation episodes.