Enhancing Dyadic Performance Through Boundary Spanners and Innovation: An Assessment of Service Provider–Customer Relationships
研究服务提供者派驻客户现场的边界跨越员工，发现其感知的外部组织支持会激发对客户的情感承诺，进而促进知识交流与物流创新，最终提升双方绩效。
Firms recognize that working together through collaborative relationships offers potential benefits such as improving cooperation, information sharing, and overall performance. An additional and extremely valuable benefit of working together is the potential for creating innovative business approaches and solutions. Thus, developing external linkages has become a higher priority within many organizations. Boundary spanning employees offer one means of achieving closer cross‐firm relationships. We investigate the roles of boundary spanners by examining service providers and their relationships with customers. More specifically, we examine boundary spanning employees that are physically on‐site at customer facilities. Results provide strong support that boundary spanners perceiving higher levels of external organizational support from a client subsequently develop affective commitment to the customer. This, in turn, drives knowledge exchange and logistics innovation. A relationship between logistics innovation and performance (of service providers and of customers) was also found. Managerial implications of the research findings are discussed and suggestions presented covering future research.