| In recent years,the environment of service industry is increasingly characterized by uncertainty,dynamic and complexity,which poses a severe challenge to service enterprises how to improve service experience and obtain competitiveness through service innovation.Moreover,innovation in the service industry is easy to be imitated,thus service enterprises urgently need to develop innovative services with strong heterogeneity and have the capability of continuous novelty service development.To be more innovative and flexible,managers must first change their mindset.Design thinking,as a customer-centric approach to innovation that uses designers’understanding and methods to solve complex problems,has become a popular lexicon in innovative practices in various fields,including business and management fields.However,there is a lack of existing research on the relationship between design thinking and service innovation in the service industry,and no systematic theoretical framework has been found.The lack of research leads to the lack of understanding of the relationship between design thinking and service innovation,such as "what impact will design thinking bring to the innovation of service enterprises?" and "how does design thinking affect service innovation in service context?";these have become the important issues to be solved in the research of design thinking and service innovation.Therefore,this study takes hospitality,a typical service industry,as the research context,focusing on the problem of "the impact of managers’ design thinking on hotel service innovation",and uses qualitative research methods such as interview method and grounded research method to uncover this problem.The study clarifies the dimension composition of hotel managers’ design thinking,constructs a theoretical framework for managers’ design thinking to affect the teams and employees’ service innovation performance,develops a measurement scale for managers’ design thinking,and further empirically tests the theoretical framework at the team level.The main contents and conclusions of the study include:Firstly,through interviewing the managers and employees of the front-line departments of upscale hotels,this study conducts an exploratory study on the managers’ design thinking and its impact in the hotel context.Then,based on the grounded theory research method,the obtained text materials were coded.The findings are as follows:1)the managers’ design thinking in a context of hotel is a mindset to discover and solve service problems in the way of designers,including external insight,problem orientation,open thinking,integrated thinking,experimentalism,and collaboration;2)managers’ design thinking is influenced by individual characteristics,work value orientation,and hotel innovation strategy and support;3)managers’ design thinking positively affects the team and employees’ service innovation performance.Specifically,managers’ design thinking affects two different types of service innovation(incremental and radical service innovation)through its influence on team design thinking and team knowledge exploration and utilization,thus affecting team service innovation performance.As for the influence of individual service innovation,managers’design thinking affects employees’ imitative service innovation and original service innovation through the influence of employees’ cognitive flexibility,exploratory and exploitative learning and autonomous motivation,and then affects employees’ service innovation performance.Secondly,on the basis of literature research,using interviews,data analysis,and questionnaire survey,this study extracts the measurement items of managers’ design thinking in the hotel context,revises the measurement of managers’ design thinking,forming an operational measurement tool.Specifically,through the process of item compilation,pre-survey and formal survey,and scale reliability and validity verification,the measurement scale of managers’ design thinking in the context of hotel was studied and revised,and a total of 25 items were finally obtained.Third,this study further empirically examines the impact mechanism of managers’design thinking on team service innovation performance.Combined with literature study and exploratory research and based on social learning theory,the study builds the "managers’design thinking—team design thinking—team service innovation performance" research model.This study further includes team shared mental model and new technology adoption as the moderating factors into the research model.In this study,the managers of the front-line departments in upscale hotels(4-and 5-star)were selected as the survey objects.Data were obtained through questionnaire survey,and were analyzed by SPSS22.0.AMOS24.0 and Mplus 8.0 analysis softwares.The following conclusions were drawn:1)Managers’ design thinking has a significant positive total impact on both incremental service innovation and radical service innovation;and it has a direct positive impact on incremental service innovation,but no significant direct effect on radical service innovation;2)manager’s design thinking promotes the team design thinking,and the team sharing mental model enhanced the positive effect of manager’s design thinking on team design thinking;3)team design thinking can promote both incremental service innovation and radical service innovation,and has a stronger positive effect on radical service innovation;4)both incremental service innovation and radical service innovation have a positive effect on team service innovation performance,and the effect of radical service innovation is stronger than that of incremental service innovation;5)team design thinking plays a mediation role between managers’ design thinking and the two types of team service innovation.Specifically,team design thinking partial mediates the relationship between managers’ design thinking and incremental service innovation,while fully mediates the relationship between managers’ design thinking and radical service innovation;6)team design thinking and team incremental service innovation/radical service innovation play a chain mediating role between managers’ design thinking and team service innovation performance;7)new technology adoption has a positive moderating effect on team design thinking and team radical service innovation,but has no significant moderating effect on team design thinking and team incremental service innovation.This study has the following theoretical implications and innovativeness in promoting the research of design thinking and service innovation:First,this study fills the gaps of current design thinking research in the service field or service innovation context.Although design thinking originated in the field of design,it is not limited to solving design problems,but can also deal with problems in different contexts.Previous studies on design thinking have shown its strong interdisciplinary features.Although design thinking has attracted some attention in business and management practice,the current studies are relatively lacking in theoretical research on design thinking in the field of service innovation.Taking the hotel industry as the research context,this study explores the impact of design thinking on service innovation performance,which enriches the research on design thinking and service innovation and responds to the call of previous scholars to explore the relationship between design thinking and service innovation.Second,unlike previous studies that stopped at exploring the potential of design thinking for service innovation,this study establishes a theoretical framework for the influence of managers’ design thinking on hotel team and employee service innovation performance through exploratory research,answers the problem of how the design thinking impact different levels service innovation results,promoting the research on the mechanism of how design thinking influence on service innovation.This study introduces the social learning theory to explain the influence mechanism,thus builds a theoretical basis for the research on the impact of design thinking on service innovation,and promotes the research on the impact of design thinking on the service innovation from the theoretical perspective,establishing more theoretical footholds for design thinking in the field of service innovation research.Third,the study enriches the empirical research on design thinking and service innovation.Most of the previous studies were conceptual,theoretical and case studies,and only a few of them had empirically tested the role of design thinking in influencing innovation outcomes.The first step in conducting empirical research is to clarify its composition and measurement.Although previous studies generally regarded design thinking as a multi-dimensional construct,there was no consensus on the division of specific dimensions.Moreover,no research has explored the structure of managers’ design thinking in the context of hotel service context.Therefore,this study clarified its specific composition,revised its measurement scale,tested its reliability and validity,thus provided a tool for subsequent empirical research.Furthermore,this study empirically tested the influence mechanism of managers’ design thinking on team service innovation performance,which further verified the influence of design thinking on hotel service innovation performance through empirical test.Although previous researchers have proposed the advantage of design thinking to facilitate the effectiveness of service innovation,but this argument has not been empirical tested.Through questionnaire survey and statistical analysis,this study examines the impact of managers’ design thinking on different degrees of service innovation(incremental service innovation and radical service innovation)and team service innovation performance through team design thinking,and examines the moderating role of team characteristics(team shared mental model)and resource support(new technology adoption).The results provide empirical evidence for the value of design thinking in driving service innovation. |
PDF Full Text Request