The Impacts Of Interactive Characteristics Of Customer Participation On Service Performance

With the increasing important roles played by service sectors in global economics, research topics related to service marketing are drawing widely attention from both the theorists and the practitioners. Especially, customer participation in services have been extensively studies in the recent decade. Although some research findings show that there is a positive relationship between customer participation in services and organization performance, yet other studies find insignificant relationship between customer participation and organization performance, and still there are some studies find the opposite relationship. In order to resolve the discrepancies among these studies, based on a role stress theory perspective, this dissertation explores how the interactive characteristics of customer participation affect perceived role stress of customers, and how perceived role stress affect service performance.According to the above research questions and research thoughts, we first introduce the research background of this dissertation, propose the main research questions to be resolved, and discuss the potential theoretical and practical implications of our research. After that, we give a brief introduction of research methods adopted.Next, based on an extensive review of literatures on customer participation in service encounters, interactions in customer participation and social interaction theory, we posit three main interactive characteristics of customer participation, i.e., interpersonal interactivity, cross-departmental contact and task interdependence; based on an review on role stress theory, we propose that the role stressors perceived by customers in service participation include role ambiguity and role conflict; after a review of the coping strategies adopted by individuals, we discuss two coping strategies used by customers in our research context, i.e., problem-focused coping strategy and emotion-focused coping strategy. Then, we propose an integrated research framework and corresponding research hypotheses.We empirically test the proposed hypotheses in the dissertation by using an questionnaire survey study in personal finance services. We give a detailed description of the research design, including survey background, samples, scales selecting, developing and measuring, etc. We check the reliability and validity of the scales used in the survey, and use hierarchical multiple regression method to test the hypotheses. The findings of our empirical testing include the following aspects. First, the interactive characteristics of customer participation significantly affect customers’ perceived role stressors. Interpersonal interactivity is negatively related to role ambiguity and role conflict. In contrast, cross-departmental contact and task interdependence positively correlate with role stressors. Second, the level of market maven of customers negatively moderates the relationships between cross-departmental contact and role stressors, but positively moderates the relationships between task interdependence and role stressors. The third, there is a significant negative relationship between role ambiguity and perceived service quality, and this relationship is positively moderated by customers’ problem-focused coping level. The last, the relationship between role conflict and perceived service quality is positively moderated by customers’ problem-focused coping level, but negatively moderated by customers’ emotion-focused coping level.The findings of our research have important theoretical implications for explaining the discrepancy in extant literature on customer participation, and enlarge the application of role stress theory and the boundary of its application. At the end of the dissertation, we provide service companies with several important managerial suggestions, admit the limitations of the dissertation and pinpoint the direction of future research on this topic.