Marion Büttgen

Even though researchers are increasingly acknowledging the dark side of customer participation (i.e., behavioral customer engagement), particularly in professional services with high cognitive demands that cause customer participation stress (i.e., negative psychological state resulting from the customer's overextension by required customer participation efforts), insights on how firms can effectively mitigate customer participation stress remains limited. Building on transactional stress theory, we investigate whether customers can effectively cope with the expected cognitive demands of professional services. Moreover, by introducing an adapted coping construct (i.e., coping support), we examine whether employees can provide coping support to help decrease customer participation stress. The findings of a time‐lagged field study with customers of a large German bank ( N = 117) suggest that customer coping before the encounter cannot mitigate the effect of anticipated cognitive demands on customer participation stress. Instead, the results of both the field study and a follow‐up experimental study ( N = 218) show that a certain set of employee coping support during service encounters is crucial. While focusing on action coping support is not ideal in situations with high cognitive demands, firms should advise their professional service employees to offer emotional coping support to attenuate the unfavorable effect of cognitive demands on customer participation stress.

The powerful and disruptive changes associated with digital transformation make leadership more complex than before, which results in new and demanding challenges for companies and leaders alike. Thus, building on the competing values framework (CVF), which postulates that leaders must adopt multiple roles and behaviors, the current research aims to identify leadership roles appropriate in digital transformation and subsequently investigate whether the existing CVF roles are still relevant. A qualitative study was conducted to identify appropriate leadership behaviors in digital transformation. Additionally, a measurement scale for the identified leadership roles was developed and tested. Furthermore, multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to test the degree‐of‐fit between the identified leadership roles in digital transformation and the four CVF quadrants. The results reveal that new leadership roles emerge in the context of digital transformation. Some original CVF roles are still relevant, but others should be modified. Overall, the findings indicate that leaders need a broad behavioral complexity to master the emerging leadership challenges in digital transformation.