Encouraging Customer Participation by Leveraging Interdependence Structure and Relationship Commitments: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Industrial Firms

Encouraging Customer Participation by Leveraging Interdependence Structure and Relationship Commitments: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Industrial Firms

The literature suggests that integrating customers into value creation can strengthen a company’s core competencies. It is still unclear, however, how inter-firm dependence structure impacts the customer’s willingness to participate. This paper explores the impacts of two dimensions of interdependence structure between seller and buyer (total interdependence and interdependence symmetry) on customer participation via the customer’s calculative and affective commitments. It also examines in industrial marketing contexts the moderating effects of environmental dynamism, process interdependence, and technological complexity in the customer commitments and participation link. The conceptual model and research hypotheses were tested using data collected from a survey of 376 business-to-business (B2B) firms. The research findings provide insightful managerial implications for B2B firms on to how to encourage customers to participate by properly leveraging interdependence structure and customers’ relationship commitments according to environmental and task-specific characteristics.