MANAGING THE BOUNDARY SPANNER - CUSTOMER TURNOVER CONNECTION

Service-providing boundary spanners are becoming increasingly importan t in modern organizations. Minimizing the turnover of effective bounda ry spanners is clearly important, but since some turnover is inevitabl e, organizations must deal with turnover's consequences as well as its causes. In this article we propose a model for examining and managing one of the most important of those consequences: the increased risk o f losing customers as a result of the loss of a boundary spanner who d ealt with that customer. In some cases the customer actually follows t he boundary spanner to a new organization, in others the loss of the b oundary spanner simply prompts the customer to begin searching for alt ernative service providers. Our model is based on a distinction betwee n customer perceptions of the non-imitability of a firm and the non-im itability of an individual boundary spanner. We present several sugges tions as to how two levels of HR managers-the HR executive and the ope rating level HR manager-can work together to manage the problem.