مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تاثیر سرویس دهی بر عملکرد شرکت – امرالد 2018

Introduction

Over the recent decades, servitization has received increasing attention from both practitioners and scholars, and evolved from a niche topic into a broad cross-disciplinary research area (Wise and Baumgartner, 1999; Oliva and Kallenberg, 2003; Baines et al., 2011). Since the term “servitization” was first coined by Vandermerwe and Rada (1988) to delineate the process of creating value by adding services to products, there have been growing studies in this field. Many manufacturing enterprises regard servitization as an important route to acquire growth, profitability, and economic stability (Spohrer and Maglio, 2008; Bandinelli and Gamberi, 2011). Neely (2008) reports that globally over a third of manufacturing firms have servitized. Increasingly, firms recognize and utilize servitization as a viable means of creating value and making profits. For example, the core business of IBM has gradually shifted to provide solutions for customers and Rolls-Royce’s annual report in 2015 revealed that more than half of its total revenues were generated from maintenance on its engine products. Considering the expected benefits of servitization, many scholars have explored the impact of servitization on firm performance but provided inconsistent results (Oliva and Kallenberg, 2003; Neu and Brown, 2005; Gebauer and Fleisch, 2007; Fang et al., 2008; Neely, 2008; Lapré, 2011; Suarez et al., 2013). Some studies confirm the positive effect of servitization on firm performance. For example, Homburg et al. (2002, 2003) find positive effects of retailers’ service orientation on customer relationship quality, service profitability, and overall company profitability. Skaggs and Droege (2004) argue that manufacturing firms with service infusion achieved higher financial performance than pure manufacturers. Antioco et al. (2008) highlight the positive impact of service orientation on relative product sales. Chen and Tsou (2012) suggest that firms can create superior performance gains through customer service in the IT industry. In contrast, there are also studies showing a negative association between servitization and firm performance. For example, Neely (2008) evidences the negative effect of servitization on financial performance based on data from manufacturing firms in 25 countries, and Visnjic et al. (2012) argue that the increasing service breadth erodes firms’ profit. Sousa and Silveira (2017) contend that advanced services positively affect firms’ sales and profitability while basic services negatively affect firms’ profitability. Furthermore, researchers have found non-linear effects of servitization on firm performance. The findings by Fang et al. (2008) and Kohtamäki, Partanen, Parida and Wincent (2013) reveal a U-shaped relationship between servitization and firm performance, whereas Visnjic and van Looy (2013) find a positive S-shaped association between the scale of service activities and profit margin. So far, the extant literature shows mixed findings on the performance effect of servitization, which implies the need for further investigation of the servitization-performance relationship. Besides, due to the mixed findings on the performance effect of servitization, researchers speculate that there might be contingency factors affecting the servitization-performance relationship. Some studies have examined the moderating role of firm-related characteristics such as slack resource, service relatedness, networking capabilities, and product innovation (e.g. Fang et al., 2008; Eggert et al., 2011; Kohtamäki, Partanen, Parida and Wincent, 2013).