How to Effectively Manage the Dark Side and Bright Side of Customer Participation in Salesperson Job-Related Outcomes

Over the past decade, customer participation in the value co-creation process has received a great amount of research attention. Occupying a boundary-spanner position, salespeople play a critical role in developing and maintaining relational exchanges with customers in the value co-creation process. This study relies on the job demands-resources (JD-R) theory to propose a conceptual model articulating the effects of two dimensions of customer participation, those being information provision and coproduction, on the salesperson’s job stress (i.e., role ambiguity and role conflict) and job engagement (i.e., sales planning, adaptive selling and selling effort). More importantly, this study articulates that the linkages between customer participation and salesperson job-related outcomes are contingent on informal and formal controls of an organization. That is, organizations may enhance the beneficial effects of customer participation and mitigate the detrimental effects of customer participation on salesperson job-related outcomes by developing appropriate sales control systems and organizational climates. The knowledge gained through this study provides specific managerial implications in relation to effectively managing the influences of customer participation in sales encounters.