Recovery Management in Business-to-Business Markets

In the year 2010, a failure of the Trent 900 aircraft engine supplied by Rolls Royce PLC to the aircraft manufacturer Airbus S.A.S. resulted in the grounding of the entire A380 fleet of Airbus’s customer Qantas Airways Ltd. for several days (Mouawad 2010). For its inappropriate response and information on the failure incident, Rolls Royce received substantial criticism from its customers and the media (Michaels and Pasztor 2010). In contrast to Rolls Royce, Qantas engaged in proactive information on the background of the incident and the actions taken to resolve the situation and attained a positive impact on its reputation for the way of handling the incident (Collerton 2010). For Rolls Royce, the failure situation and its way of handling it had a negative impact on its market reputation, raising doubts on its capabilities to develop and manufacture reliable aircraft engines. Consequently, the failure incident resulted in a significant drop of the Rolls Royce shares at the London Stock Exchange (Clark and Mouawad 2010) and substantially lower profits for Rolls Royce in the respective financial year (Mustoe and Rothman 2010).

On the basis of the research questions defined in paragraph 1.2, the present chapter establishes the terminological and conceptual foundation of the investigation to introduce the fundamental terms and concepts, which are considered in the course of the subsequent investigation (cf. figure 2.1).

As defined in paragraph 1.3, the third chapter examines and critically reflects on the theoretical foundation for the subsequent qualitative and quantitative investigation on recovery management in business-to-business markets (cf. figure 3.1).

The qualitative investigation conducted in the fourth chapter is intended to develop a profound understanding of the nature of recovery management in business-to-business markets and derive insights on the conceptual dimensions of recovery in this specific market context (cf. figure 4.1).

On the basis of the insights derived from the qualitative investigation, chapter five presents the quantitative investigation on recovery management in business-to-business markets. More specifically, the relational consequences and financial consequences of recovery management in business markets are examined in the course of a cross-sectional, quantitative investigation (cf. figure 5.1).

Based on the findings derived from the qualitative investigation in chapter four and the quantitative investigation in chapter five, the present and final chapter presents and discusses the fundamental conclusions on recovery management in business markets (cf. figure 6.1).