Exchange-specific self-disclosure, social self-disclosure, and personal selling

Self-disclosures promote long-term relationships with customers (Crosby, Evans, and Cowles 1990) because, for example, social conversations grant customers a special intimate status (Berry 1995) and open communications foster customers' trust (Morgan and Hunt 1994). Although all interpersonal behaviors and internal processes guide relationship formation, mutual self-disclosure is the chief way to move customer-salesperson dyads beyond mere acquaintanceships (Altman and Taylor 1973). As such, models of customer-salesperson interaction often include a self-disclosure construct (Crosby, Evans, and Cowles 1990). Nonetheless, a single construct may not suffice; the psychology literature suggest that self-disclosure is minimally a two-dimensional construct comprised of exchange-specific self-disclosures, which are essential to a pending exchange, and social self-disclosures, which are incidental to a pending exchange (Hosman 1987). In this vein, we test a model that relates exchange specific and social self-disclosure to customers' trust in a salesperson, customers' satisfaction with a salesperson, customers' attraction to a salesperson, and customer salesperson relationship potential.