Exploring the Dimensionality of Opportunism in Inter-Organizational Relationships with Meta-Analysis

What is opportunism, actually? Willamson’s canonical definition of self-interest seeking with guile contains a broad range of opportunistic behaviors. We argue that opportunism is a multi-dimensional concept and study which aspects of the different opportunistic behaviors have the most harmful consequences in inter-organizational relationships. We combine qualitative content analysis with meta-analysis and investigate the survey data of 178 primary studies at the item level. In the first step, we synthesize a taxonomy of the dimensions of opportunism. In the second step, we meta-analytically test the dimensions’ moderating effects on the relationships between opportunism-performance and opportunism-trust. The results show that certain aspects of behaviors – the type of claim violation, the degree of activity, the disclosure certainty, and the behavioral medium – determine how strongly opportunism harms performance and trust. Our study offers a taxonomy of the dimensionality of inter-organizational opportunism and compares the aspects of organizational behaviors that have the most harmful consequences. It further provides an empirical synthesis of the consequences of opportunism. Opportunism harms integrity trust and long-term value creation more than short-term financial performance highlighting the dramatic economic consequences of opportunism for value creation in inter-organizational relationships.