Three essays on emotion exchange in marketing relationships

Abstract

Relationships are an integral part of everyday life and play a large role in how products are negotiated, delivered, and consumed. As researchers, our understanding of, and ability to predict relationship outcomes is being held back because emotions are complex. Not isolating emotion from the rest of the social exchange process limits our understanding of social exchange relationships. My dissertation begins to address this gap in social exchange relationship research and separates emotion from other forms of communication or information exchange. In essay 1, I describe the development and validation of a parsimonious, generalizable scale that measures emotion exchange in social exchange interactions. In essay 2, I demonstrate the exchange of emotion between two relational partners and examine potential factors that may influence the process of emotion exchange. I show that violating relational norms rules during an interaction will lead to emotion exchange. Through these studies, I begin to identify the impact that expressing emotion during a social exchange interaction has on the social exchange relationship. Using a social exchange framework, in essay 3, I empirically test the relationships between emotion exchange and the dimensions of trust. I find support for the positive influence of emotion exchange on relational outcomes such as salesperson-sales manager rapport. Finally, I show that sales manager calculative commitment negatively impacts the employee's trust and calculative commitment.