Customer-Oriented Boundary Spanning, Functional Diversity, and Customer Adoption

Abstract

For teams developing products or services to meet customer needs, customer adoption of team deliverables is core to their success. When such teams focus on complex, tailored deliverables, customer adoption can be expected to benefit from team information elaboration—the exchange, discussion, and integration of team members' knowledge and perspectives—to develop solutions for customer needs. We aim to shed light on how teams can focus on the customer's perspective within the elaboration process to drive customer adoption. We propose that whereas engaging with the customer's perspective is key to customer adoption, teams may only do this to a modest degree unless they are stimulated to put the customer perspective center-stage. Extending information elaboration theory by drawing on the attention-based view, we propose that customer-oriented boundary spanning—engaging with the customer to champion the customer's perspective within the team—strengthens the shared objective of serving the customer to guide information elaboration and increase the quality of knowledge work. We argue that this effect is moderated by team functional background diversity: increased attention to the customer's perspective guides teams to better use their informational resources and this benefit is stronger with greater functional background diversity. These predictions were supported in a field experiment with a customer-oriented boundary spanning intervention (N = 144 teams). Shared objectives and information elaboration sequentially mediated the effect of customer-oriented boundary spanning and the indirect effect from customer-oriented boundary spanning to customer adoption was stronger with greater functional diversity.