The Influence of Spirituality on Buyer Perception Within Business-to-Business Marketing Relationships: A Cross-Cultural Exploration and Comparison

Abstract

Within business-to-business relationship marketing, boundary-spanning representatives play a crucial role in establishing and maintaining positive relations between their organizations. Spirituality, a workplace individual-level variable, is proposed to significantly influence buyer representatives’ relationship formation with their seller counterparts, which subsequently affects the relationship development between organizations. Here we identify aspects of spirituality within buyer representatives and present a conceptual framework that delineates the impact of spirituality upon individual perceptions of relational constructs such as trust and commitment. Structural equation modeling analyses support the inclusion of spirituality as a relevant construct in relationship marketing research. In addition, because cultural differences are known to exist regarding the role of spirituality, the impact of spirituality upon perception within relationship marketing is addressed with data collected from both American and Chinese buying representatives. The results indicate that spirituality is significantly related to perceptions about communication, commitment, and shared values for both sets of participants.

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