Customer-facing informational disclosure in B2B selling: an ethical reading through the lens of organizational tensions

Purpose This study aims to investigate how business-to-business (B2B) salespeople enact and calibrate customer-facing informational disclosure during buyer–seller interaction episodes. More specifically, it examines how disclosure is managed in practice, how it becomes ethically consequential and how it can be interpreted through a tensions-based perspective. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a qualitative research design based on 17 in-depth interviews with Italian B2B sales professionals operating across different industries. Data were analyzed through the Gioia methodology, with first-order concepts inductively derived from informants’ accounts and second-order themes and aggregate dimensions developed through theoretically informed researcher interpretation, thereby preserving informants’ language while building a theoretically grounded interpretive model. Findings The findings show that customer-facing informational disclosure is not a uniform act of information transfer but a differentiated and calibrated interactional practice. Three aggregate dimensions emerged: enactment of customer-facing informational disclosure, contingencies shaping disclosure calibration and perceived interactional consequences of disclosure choices. Disclosure encompasses product/technical and economic/contractual content, a problem-framing and fit-clarification function and calibration through sequencing and selective emphasis and is associated with both positive and negative perceived outcomes. A subsequent tensions-informed abductive interpretation of the empirical contingencies yields six tension configurations shaping disclosure calibration: two customer-facing interorganizational tensions, two intraorganizational tensions (one vertical and one horizontal), one upstream interorganizational tension and one epistemic tension. Overall, customer-facing informational disclosure emerges as a multidimensional interactional phenomenon composed of four core attributes: calibration, situatedness, ethical salience and tension-ladenness. Originality/value The paper makes three main contributions. First, it refines the disclosure literature in B2B selling by specifying customer-facing informational disclosure as a directional, episode-level articulation of business disclosure and examining how it is enacted and calibrated in interaction episodes. Second, it contributes to sales ethics by showing that the ethical problem of disclosure does not only lie in explicit deception but also in how information is sequenced or withheld. Third, it extends the tensions literature by introducing customer-facing informational disclosure as a new object of inquiry and by showing how competing demands shape disclosure choices in B2B interaction episodes.