مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Service innovation predominantly serves two functions (Wilder, Collier, & Barnes, 2014). First, new services help attract new customers and retain existing ones, and second, service innovations may help increase service productivity, such as the number of customers served per hour (Rust & Huang, 2012; Singh, 2000). Recent examples for both categories can be found in many service settings, especially those driven by technological advancements. For example, to increase customer satisfaction and delight, Burberry, the British fashion retailer, has begun to offer “direct-tobuy”, a method to buy fashion directly from the catwalk based on a mixture of live streaming and personalized versions of shown clothes (Service Innovation Cases, 2015). Focusing on the second function of service innovation, McDonald’s has introduced FastOrder, a system that allows customers to order meals without human interaction in some of its most frequently visited locations, such as in airports, to increase service productivity (Blank, 2014).

Researchers and practitioners both acknowledge that service innovation is an especially crucial factor in the financial performance of service organizations (e.g., Ordanini & Parasuraman, 2011; Paton & McLaughlin, 2008). However, in contrast to research that focuses on firm-level data, research that is devoted to determining employees’ roles in the generation and delivery of service innovations remains underexplored (Cadwallader, Jarvis, Bitner, & Ostrom, 2010). Customer contact personnel are crucial to the execution of service offerings; as Zeithaml, Bitner, and Gremler (2006, p. 352) state, “employees are the service” in many people-processing services (Walsh, 2011). In particular, frontline service employees (FLEs), defined as those employees who have frequent personal interactions with customers (Karatepe & Kilic, 2009; Stock, 2015), are needed to successfully introduce and explain new services to customers. Thus, based on their motivation to recommend newly designed service offerings to customers (or not), service employees are in a position to either promote or impede service innovation implementation (Cadwallader et al., 2010; McKnight & Hawkrigg, 2005). However, while the creation of new services with the help of FLEs received considerable research attention (e.g., Engen & Magnusson, 2015; Yang, Lee, & Cheng, 2016), less is known about how services are actually implemented with the help of FLEs.

Engaging in service innovation implementation (SII) may be viewed as a form of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), which is defined as individual extra-role behavior that is directed toward the employing organization and employees’ co-workers but is not part of the work contract (Podsakoff, Whiting, Podsakoff, & Blume, 2009). Similarly, SII is usually not included in job descriptions and thus is not directly controllable by management. For example, although firms might distribute service scripts that statehow new services have to be recommended to customers (Nguyen, Groth, Walsh, & Hennig-Thurau, 2014), if and how FLEs adhere to these scripts is often outside of management’s knowledge. This situation is similar to those where customer-contact employees hide customer complaints from their supervisors (Harris & Ogbonna, 2010; Walsh, Yang, Dose, & Hille, 2015). Thus, factors known to affect employees’ OCBs are likely to affect SII, too.