Developing outsourcing relationships: a Romanian service provider perspective

Among the other Central and Eastern European countries, Romania is one of the emerging outsourcing destinations. The current paper presents the findings of an exploratory study on the development of outsourcing relationships from the perspective of Romanian vendors. In our perspective, the development of an outsourcing relationship is a learning process occurring in time, going through different phases and influenced by various factors. Based on the existing literature on outsourcing relationships, we introduce a phase model of outsourcing relationships seen from the vendors’ perspective. The study is focused mainly on the cultural compatibility of Romanian vendors with customers coming from Western cultures and it is exploratory and descriptive in its nature. A small-scale survey and a multiple case study involving a number of SMEs and freelancers were used for data collection. The findings include, beside a good cultural compatibility between Romanian vendors and Western customers, insights on the ability of Romanian software developers to work with vague specifications and on their remarkable creativity and capacity to innovate.