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Delusive perception—antecedents and consequences of salespeople’s misperception of customer commitment

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Abstract

Although salespeople’s perception of their customers is often systematically biased, research on the antecedents and consequences of perceptual inaccuracy in customer–salesperson relationships is still scarce and limited in scope. Drawing on findings from personality research and social psychology, we therefore empirically examine potential antecedents and consequences of salespeople’s misperception of customer commitment in 233 customer–salesperson dyads. Results provide evidence of the effects of customer-related factors, relationship-related factors, and salesperson-related factors on the extent of salespeople’s misperception of customer commitment. Moreover, we show that salespeople with an upwardly biased perception of customer commitment engage in less relationship-building effort, which in turn negatively affects customer behavior.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marketing, University of Mannheim, L 5,1, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Christian Homburg & Max Kretzer

  2. Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Christian Homburg

  3. Institute of Business Administration, University of Stuttgart, 70174, Stuttgart, Germany

    Torsten Bornemann

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  1. Christian Homburg
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  2. Torsten Bornemann
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  3. Max Kretzer
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Correspondence to Christian Homburg.

Additional information

All authors contributed equally to this paper. The authors thank Tomas Hult and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments during the review process.

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Table 4 Scale items for construct measurement
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Homburg, C., Bornemann, T. & Kretzer, M. Delusive perception—antecedents and consequences of salespeople’s misperception of customer commitment. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 42, 137–153 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-013-0347-4

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