Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Industrial Marketing Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/indmarman Research paper Collective engagement in organizational settings Michael Kleinaltenkamp a, ⁎ , Ingo O. Karpen b,c , Carolin Plewa d , Elina Jaakkola e , Jodie Conduit f a Freie Universität Berlin, School of Business & Economics Arnimallee 11, 14195 Berlin, Germany b Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University, 379-405 Russell St, Melbourne, Vic 3000, Australia c Department of Marketing, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark d Entrepreneurship, Commercialisation and Innovation Centre, 10 Pulteney Street, The University of Adelaide, 5005, Australia e Turku School of Economics, Rehtorinpellonkatu 3, 20014 University of Turku, Finland f The University of Adelaide Business School, Pulteney Street, The University of Adelaide, 5005, Australia ABSTRACT Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in marketing. Despite extensive scholarly investigations and managerial interest though, considerations of customer engagement and emotional connections in business marketing have been scant. Researchers tend to focus on individual-level engagement, which is conceptually inadequate to address the inherently multi-actor nature of business-to-business marketing. Therefore, this article introduces the concept of collective engagement, highlighting both its characteristics and the conditions for its emergence. The resulting theoretical framework, with ten propositions, outlines the multidimensional nature of collective engagement, including its multiplicative aggregation, multidirectional valence, phenomenological and shared properties, emotional and institutional interdependence, and emergence in dynamic and multichannel settings. Collective engagement also offers a mechanism for considering emotionsinbusinessmarketing,atopicthatthusfarhasbeenlargelyignoredbytheprevalentrationalchoiceparadigm.Thus,thisarticlecontributesasystematic, coherentconceptualizationofcollectiveengagementandadvancesthetheoreticaldomainsofcustomerandactorengagementinparticularandbusiness-to-business research in general, while also suggesting a detailed research agenda. 1. Introduction Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in mar- keting,commonlyviewedasacustomer'selevatedcognitive,emotional and behavioral disposition toward brands or firms (e.g., Brodie, Hollebeek, Jurić, & Ilić, 2011). Marketing literature has thus far pri- marily examined customer engagement in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts. Recent research indicates that engagement is also highly re- levant in business-to-business (B2B) contexts (e.g., Kumar & Pansari, 2016; Reinartz & Berkmann, 2018; Jaakkola & Aarikka-Stenroos, this issue; Youssef, Johnston, AbdelHamid, Dakrory, & Seddick, 2018), however this research is only emerging and the existing understanding on engagement by organizational actors remains embryonic. The current, consumer-focused marketing research tends to treat engagement as an individual-level phenomenon (e.g., Brodie et al., 2011; Vivek, Dalela, & Beatty, 2016). Indeed, while researchers have acknowledged engagement even in multi-actor contexts and through multi-actor perspectives (e.g., Li, Juric, & Brodie, 2017), such research continues to define, treat and study engagement as an individual's property. In this paper we argue that this view is insufficient for con- ceptualizing engagement (see also Nunan, Sibai, Schivinski, & Christodoulides, 2018), particularly in organizational contexts: recent organizational and occupational psychology research (e.g., Costa, Passos, & Bakker, 2014; García Buades, Martínez-Tur, Ortiz-Bonin, & Peiro, 2016; Schneider, Yost, Kropp, Kind, & Lam, 2017) suggests that engagement may also be a collective construct. The prevalence of the collective manifests in common organizational concepts like work teams (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998), the buying center (e.g., Johnston & Bonoma, 1981), and the usage center (Macdonald, Kleinaltenkamp, & Wilson, 2016, Huber & Kleinaltenkamp, 2019). Moreover, many organizational examples an- ecdotally demonstrate the relevance of engagement on a collective level: Consider joint innovation projects in which employees from the customer and supplier firms work within and across internal and ex- ternal organizational units. Throughout such projects, their interac- tions, thoughts, and enthusiasm for the innovation ideally coalesce, with significant potential influences on overall project success. This variety of individual actors interacting within or across com- pany boundaries in organizational settings makes it highly pertinent to gain a clear understanding of collective engagement. In turn, focusing only on engagement by individual actors risks ignoring key behavioral aspects that arise from the inherent social embeddedness of actors and thatarekeyforshapingthesuccessoffirmsandinterfirmrelationships (Schneider et al., 2017). Moreover, neglecting engagement as a https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2019.02.009 Received 18 March 2017; Received in revised form 9 February 2019; Accepted 12 February 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: michael.kleinaltenkamp@fu-berlin.de (M.Kleinaltenkamp), ingo.karpen@rmit.edu.au (I.O.Karpen), carolin.plewa@adelaide.edu.au (C.Plewa), elina.jaakkola@utu.fi (E. Jaakkola), jodie.conduit@adelaide.edu.au (J. Conduit). Industrial Marketing Management xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0019-8501/ Crown Copyright © 2019 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Michael Kleinaltenkamp, et al., Industrial Marketing Management, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2019.02.009