Changing roles of customers: consequences for HRM

Purpose - The objective of this paper is to provide research-ers and practitioners with an understanding of the implica-tions and consequences of changes in customer roles and involvement on HRM within a service context.
Design/Approach - This paper is conceptual and the ap-proach adopted is analytical. Extant research and concepts have been used to analyse customer roles and customer involvement and their effects on employees. Based on these insights, managerial and research implications are dis-cussed.
Findings - The insights from this study provide conceptual support for including customers as a relevant reference and/or extension of human resource management (HRM) beyond the organisational boundaries. Customers can actu-ally significantly influence the success of a company's HRM.
Research limitations/implications - Analysis of the interre-latedness of customer involvement and HRM is limited to services than encompass emotional and communicative aspects. It is argued that an extension of HRM concepts by considering customers' influence provides great potential for future research opportunities.
Practical implications - The paper discusses the contribu-tion of central HRM functions in increasing the customer orientation of employees and companies, reducing role con-flicts and role ambiguity, and creating added value for cus-tomers. The aspects described here have the potential to contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of HRM and to increase the added value of the HRM function to the organisation.
Originality/value - To date, HRM and customer roles gen-erally have been investigated separately. The analysis of the interrelatedness of these two worlds is likely to trigger and encourage innovative research designs and alternative methodological approaches to new research problems, lead-ing to the added potential of novel research findings with important implications for practice.