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Customer participation and service outcomes: Mediating role of task-related affective
well-being
Purpose – This paper contributes to transformative service research by drawing on self-
determination, elicitation of emotions framework, and feelings-as-information theories to
explore how customer participation, task-related affective well-being, customer knowledge,
task complexity, and service outcomes relate with each other.
Design/methodology/approach – A synthesis of relevant literature on customer participation
and customer well-being reveals a conceptual model with eleven testable propositions.
Findings – The conceptual model shows that task-related affective well-being mediates the
link between customer participation and service outcomes. Moreover, customer knowledge
and task complexity moderate these links.
Research limitations/implications – An empirically testable conceptual model models the
roles of task-related affective well-being, customer knowledge and task complexity in the
process by which customer participation influences service outcomes.
Practical implications – Service managers can use the model to design services based on the
effects of different types of customer participation on task-related affective well-being.
Originality/value – This paper is one of the first to study the mediating role of task-related
affective well-being in the relationship between customer participation and service outcomes.
It does so by revealing the differential impact various types of participation have on service
outcomes and the moderating role of customer knowledge and task complexity.
Keywords Customer participation, Service outcomes, Task-related affective well-being
Paper Type Conceptual paper
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Introduction
A key challenge facing service firms is encouraging customer participation in the process of
creating value because that requires the customer to expend their own energies to help co-
create the service. Despite this, service firms are highly motivated to encourage customer
participation as it is considered an important tool to help improve their productivity -
reflected by both service practitioners and researchers accepting and recognising the active
role of customers as resource integrators in value co-creation (Arnould, 2008; Vargo and
Lusch 2008). Customer participation is conceptualized as the degree to which customers are
involved in the production and delivery of the service by providing information, sharing
information, making suggestions and other resources (Dabholkar, 1990; Chan et al., 2010).
Typically, the concept of customer participation is widely embraced by global business
giants such as Procter and Gamble, Dell, Starbucks, and Cisco to drive their service agendas
(Ramaswamy and Gouillart, 2010) suggesting its universality as part of the service offering.
However, customers’ willingness to contribute to value co-creation seems less favorable for
the firms in relation to what they hope to achieve by actively engaging the customer in the
process (Chan et al., 2010). One reason may be an inadequate type of participation
requirement from the customer for any given service context and since this may impact
desired service outcomes, the aspect of the co-creation process needs a much richer
understanding. Differently put, service firms may not fully appreciate the potential impact
that various forms of participation may have upon the customers’ perception of the quality,
value and service experience. Not making this distinction potentially makes customer
participation a relatively ‘blunt instrument’ in creating value, so closer examination of its
effects in the service relationship is warranted.
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This is important to understand because there are various types of participation involved
in service and each dictates a distinctly different role for the customer during a service
encounter; differences that potentially influence how customers view the service offering.
Whilst the literature suggests the role of the customer varies - based on the nature of
participation, actors, service production, role behaviour, participation process, outcomes of
participation, customer input, and level of participation, etc., their combined impact on
service outcomes is still a nascent field. Dong and Sivakumar (2017) identified three types of
participation, namely mandatory, replaceable and voluntary forms and these are based on the
specific nature of participation as well as the actor participating. Conceptually the three types
of customer participation vary in the amount of effort required from the customer for them to
engage in and experience the service.
Mandatory participation refers to activities or resources that can only be performed or
provided by customers and are essential for the service to be produced or delivered.
Replaceable participation refers to customer activities or resources that can be performed or
provided by customers and/or service providers but are still essential for the service to be
produced or delivered. Voluntary participation refers to activities and/or resources that are
not essential for service production and/or its delivery, and this is largely performed at the
discretion of customers to help improve their service experience. Hence, there is a need to
understand the influence of each participation type in a service encounter and in particular
how these differences impact service outcomes, as well as intervening variables that could
potentially mediate and moderate the inter-relationship between the participation types and
these service outcomes.
Accordingly, this paper attempts to conceptualize the differential impact of each form of
participation on the potential range of service outcomes desired by the customer, which is
distinctly different from previous studies. Typically, these have identified the consequence of
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customer participation on a range of outcomes such as customer satisfaction, perceived service
quality, employee satisfaction, efficiency, loyalty and productivity, among others (e.g. Gallan
et al., 2013; Ngo and O’Cass, 2013; Cheng and Xue, 2014; Amorim et al., 2014; Dong et al.,
2015; Chen and Wang, 2016). Thus, the literature has largely focused on the impact of the
construct in relation to outcomes beneficial for the service providers that help the firm to
improve their profitability. However, when a customer participates in a service encounter, the
concern of the customer are also directly linked to their own personal experiences with the
service and/or the value perceived by them. Therefore, such concerns also need to be
considered in terms of how they influence outcomes, such as satisfaction, productivity,
performance, loyalty, among others. Hence, building on the existing literature on various
service outcomes that are relevant to the service provider we also consider additional
outcomes; accordingly, we build a model (see figure 1) to reflect these consequences.
Since service consumption dominates the lives of customers today, other factors
intrinsically linked to the service experience also play a potential role in helping to shape
customer perceptions of the service offering. Typically, customers spent a large amount of
time participating in service offerings as well as interacting with service employees, so this
ongoing experience is likely to influence their well-being (Rosenbaum et al., 2011). Thus,
most service contexts that are directly related to (e.g. nursing, mental health counselling,
physiotherapy, etc.) as well as not being specifically connected to (e.g. banking, education,
tourism, etc.) well-being potentially have a positive or negative impact on the well-being of
the customer in ways not intended (or previously foreseen) by firms (Anderson et al., 2013).
Exploring this in more detail has been identified as a priority in the emerging domain of
transformative service research, referred to as TSR (e.g., Anderson and Ostrom, 2015).
TSR focuses on the creation of elevating and inspiring changes for the improvement of
the well-being of individuals (consumers and employees), families, community, society, and
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ecosystem (Ostrom et al., 2010; Anderson et al., 2013). Well-being includes “physical health
(objective and subjective perceptions), mental health (e.g., resilience, stress, and burnout),
financial wellbeing, discrimination, marginalization, literacy, inclusion, access, capacity
building, and decreased disparity among others” (Anderson and Ostrom, 2015, p.243).
Given the centrality of service consumption (and growing customer participation) in our
everyday lives, we thus develop a conceptual model that reveals how customer well-being is
influenced by the nature of the tasks they are attempting to accomplish during the service
encounter, and how this potentially affects various service outcomes. Although research has
attempted to conceptualize the domain of TSR by considering studies on well-being, no prior
research has explained the central role of ‘task-related affective well-being’ (TR-AWB) in the
nexus between the different forms of participation on the service outcomes. With this in
mind, our conceptual model depicts TR-AWB to play a mediating role between the various
forms of customer participation and service outcomes.
We also recognise that factors specific to the customer, firm, context, and situation can
intervene in the influence of customer participation on service outcomes. Thus, by reviewing
pertinent literature our study reveals the moderation effect of customer knowledge (customer-
specific) and task complexity (firm-specific) in the mediated linkage between customer
participation, well-being, and service outcomes and, that the impact of such moderation may
vary for the different types of participation. Based on this discussion, we address the
following research questions in this paper:
RQ1. Do different types of participation (mandatory, replaceable, voluntary) influence
service outcomes differently?
RQ2. Does customer participation also influence multiple service outcomes such as customer
experience and customer value in addition to the existing outcomes?
