• Proceedings of the Korean DIstribution Association Conference
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• 2007.08a
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• pp.3-26
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• 2007

Recently, both scholars and marketers have asserted the importance of boundary spanning behaviors, such as external representation, being vocal advocates to outsiders of the organization's image, goods, and services, internal influence, taking individual initiative in communications to the firm and co-workers to improve service delivery by the organization, co-workers, and oneself, and service delivery, serving customers in a conscientious, responsive, flexible, and courteous manner. However, there is lack of study dealing with bourdary spanning behaviors bewteen organizational dyads, in which boundary spanning behaviors are expected to have important roles. The objectives of this paper is to investigate these important concerns with prior research by developing a theoretical model predicting how distinct buyer's boundary spanning behaviors occur. To be concrete, this paper develops a seller characteristics-based model of the attitudinal antecedents of three conceptually distinct forms of boundary spanning behaviors, and tests the hypothesized differential effects of seller characteristics on the three forms of boundary spanning behaviors, and investigates the extent to which these relationships are mediated by relationship satisfaction and organizational commitment. For the purpose of empirical testing, 420 respondents of leading automobile dealers, dining franchisees, industrial material retailers in Korea were surveyed and the analysis utilizing structural equation model indicated that communication quality, fairness, and marketing program dynamism had positive effects on buyer's boundary spanning behaviors via relationship satisfaction and organizational commitment. In addition, boundary spanning behaviors occurred more in contractural and corporate distribution channel than in conventional distribution channel.