Firms striving for long-term profitability need to build stronger customer-firm relationships by getting their customers more engaged with the firm. One path to this end is introducing practices to manage different forms of customer engagement behaviors (CEBs). To develop more effective and efficient CEB management practices, this research proposes and empirically tests a theoretical model on managerial and psychological processes to encourage CEBs that are embedded in a broader network of customers and stakeholders. Based on qualitative and quantitative studies in nursing homes, we demonstrate that organizational support and overall service quality toward significant others influence some forms of CEBs—more particularly feedback and positive word of mouth (WOM) behaviors—through customer affect toward the organization. It is interesting to note that customer affect toward the organization encourages WOM behaviors, while it discourages feedback behaviors. Conversely, managerial processes that increase customer role readiness—such as organizational socialization and support from other customers—were found to have a positive impact on all forms of CEBs. This research helps managers of nursing homes and other services with a broad network of customers and stakeholders to improve existing CEB management practices and develop new CEB management practices that are beneficial for the firm and its stakeholders.

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With firms concentrating on core competencies, more emphasis has been placed on outsourcing and dealing with external sourcing agents. This has led to a stronger academic focus on buyer-seller exchanges and the corresponding mechanisms for governing these exchanges. This paper gives an overview of previous research investigating the exchange governance phenomenon based on transaction cost theory or co-operative interorganizational relationships. The results reveal that few research studies have investigated the overall picture of exchange governance, including both contractual and relational governance and taking into account antecedents as well as performance outcomes of the governance mechanisms involved. Moreover, despite the service-dominant logic shift, limited attention is given to specific service characteristics and their impact on exchange governance. This paper attempts to meld economic and social related antecedents into a model with regard to exchange governance in business services settings. Contractual and relational governance issues and their impact on performance outcomes are also considered. The resulting model indicates that to govern business services exchanges efficiently, more emphasis should be placed on behavioral uncertainty, human and process asset specificity and contractual governance. The paper concludes by discussing several directions for future research.