Examining the Effects of Mutual Information Sharing and Relationship Empathy: A Social Penetration Theory Perspective

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.12.019

Several studies have emphasized the importance of salespeople putting themselves in customers’ shoes, and engaging in empathetic behaviors with customers during the course of a sale. However, while highlighting the importance of mutual information sharing, these studies largely ignore the content of disclosures between salespeople and customers. Much of the literature fails to thoroughly address how disclosures of a personal nature (e.g., the parties’ background, personal life, values) tend to affect the business relationship.

A further gap in the research concerns how studies typically examine empathy only from the perspective of the salesperson. Since salesperson and customer perceptions may not always align, it is important to understand the customer’s perception of empathy, and how their thoughts and feelings impact relationship outcomes.

A research paper published in 2019 considers how the content of personal disclosure influences relational and performance outcomes in the salesperson-customer relationship. Content includes information shared during exchanges, such as details on products, insights into the selling firm’s decision-making, and discussion around family activities. The authors investigate mutual information sharing by partitioning disclosure into business disclosure and personal disclosure, and focus on customer-felt relationship empathy, rather than viewing empathy as a salesperson trait alone.

The study helps Chief Sales Officers understand two important aspects of the customers-salesperson relationship:

1. The mechanisms responsible for the effects of the content of disclosure on relationship outcomes
2. The indirect effects of information sharing on sales and company performance

The authors build on social penetration theory to present an integrative framework of business disclosure and personal disclosure. They conduct an exploratory study using qualitative, in-depth interviews to ascertain if and how business-to-business salespeople and their customers distinguish between business and personal information disclosure and how each disclosure type, with differing content, shapes buyer-seller relationships

The procedure included 29 semi-structured interviews with sales executives, salespeople, and customers with work experience of participants reflecting a wide distribution of hierarchical levels, functions, and industries. The purpose of the qualitative interviews was to understand whether both parties in a salesperson-customer dyad recognize the use of disclosure to develop their relationships and, if so, to understand the nature of what was being shared between them.

The authors developed a conceptual framework after finding that the qualitative data offered compelling evidence for business and personal disclosure and on noting their suggested effects on building relationship empathy and trust in buyer-seller relationships. This framework focuses on the downstream effects of the business and personal content of disclosures in buyer-seller relationships and empirically tested both the subjective and objective benefits of each type of disclosure.

The research benefits Chief Sales Officers in a number of ways:

• It demarcates the critical differences between the content of business and personal disclosure and identifies the latter’s role in sales performance.
• It examines the formation and downstream effect of customer-felt relationship empathy, and
• It identifies relationship length as a moderator between customer-felt relationship empathy and trust, strengthening the view of empathy as a relationship-building mechanism. The authors surmise that customer-felt relationship empathy has a stronger effect on trust in newer relationships, signaling the strength of customer-felt relationship empathy as a relationship-building tool.