Enhancing Dyadic Performance Through Boundary Spanners and Innovation: An Assessment of Service Provider–Customer Relationships

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