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Recent open innovation literature indicates increasing concern about the quality of crowdsourced ideas. Building on a framework of creativity capability, rooted in behavioral literature, and intrinsic (vs. extrinsic) motivation, derived from personnel economics and social psychology literature, this study predicts the influence of feedback on ideation performance. Specifically, the effectiveness of feedback on ideation performance in firm‐sponsored, non–financially incentivized, idea‐crowdsourcing communities may depend on its valence (positive vs. negative), source (peers vs. firm), and ideators’ ideation experience. Field data, obtained using text‐mining techniques from an idea‐crowdsourcing community, reveal that the effects of positive (negative) peer feedback for increasing (decreasing) subsequent idea quality strengthen (weaken) as ideators gain experience. However, the effects of positive (negative) firm feedback for increasing (decreasing) subsequent idea quality weaken with ideation experience. Experienced ideators are more motivated (less demotivated) to improve subsequent ideation performance when they receive positive peer (negative firm) feedback; inexperienced ideators are less motivated by negative peer feedback but more motivated by positive firm feedback. The results are robust to tests with alternative field data and model specifications, as validated by a controlled laboratory experiment. They also suggest feedback strategies that managers can use to boost customer ideation performance in crowdsourcing contexts.

Soliciting novel ideas from the crowd is a paradigm shift for innovation that gains increasing attention from researchers and practitioners. However, studies examining the relationship between the novelty of crowdsourced ideas and firms' idea adoption decisions are surprisingly rare. This research adopts the path-of-least-resistance (POLR) theory as a new theoretical angle to examine the role of idea feasibility as a key heuristic cue mediating the effect of idea novelty on adoption decisions. We further explore factors that may amplify or mitigate this mediation. Using data collected from a laboratory experiment and a firm-sponsored crowdsourcing community, we reveal that firms tend to follow the POLR by using idea feasibility as meta-information to evaluate novel ideas in their idea adoption decisions. However, this tendency depends on external stimuli and constraints, such that the mediation of idea feasibility exists only when idea favorability from the crowd is low or when an ideator's prior ideation participation is high. Our supplementary study further offers preliminary insights on the extension of our proposed effects to the ultimate success of adopted ideas. These findings illuminate a better understanding of firms' idea adoption decisions and suggest ways to manage idea crowdsourcing effectively for new product/service development and improvements.

This study pertains to whether and how employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors toward customers (OCB-C) influence customers’ citizenship behaviors (CCB) directed toward the firm, employees, and other customers. Drawing on a social exchange perspective, this study proposes that a dual identification mechanism—spanning customer-employee identification (C-EI) and customer-firm identification (C-FI)—mediates the social exchange relationship between OCB toward customers (OCB-C) and CCB. Service climate as a key contextual factor moderates the mediating mechanisms of identification. With data collected from a field survey and an experiment, the findings confirm that the dual identification mechanism mediates the effect of OCB-C on customers’ reciprocation with CCB. The results also reveal a moderating effect of service climate, such that the positive effect of OCB-C on C-EI and C-FI grows stronger when the service climate is at low and high levels, respectively. In addition, the empirical results demonstrate that the underlying motive attribution explains the moderating effect of service climate. This work paints a more nuanced picture of the missing link in the OCB-C-CCB interface by identifying a mediating mechanism and boundary condition. To promote CCB, managers should leverage their employees’ OCB-C as well as their firms’ service climate.

Supplemental Material, Web_Appendix for An Investigation of Nonbeneficiary Reactions to Discretionary Preferential Treatments by Kimmy Wa Chan, Chi Kin (Bennett) Yim and Taeshik Gong in Journal of Service Research

Supplemental Material, Chan_Yim_Gong_Executive_Summary for An Investigation of Nonbeneficiary Reactions to Discretionary Preferential Treatments by Kimmy Wa Chan, Chi Kin (Bennett) Yim and Taeshik Gong in Journal of Service Research

Extant research confirms the importance of cocreating value with customers in service marketing, yet little is known about the impact of service agents’ work experiences on customers’ service perceptions. This research examines how service agents’ workplace ostracism from different sources (supervisors versus coworkers) influences customers’ perceived coproduction value, perceived service performance, and actual purchases. Three laboratory experiments and one survey reveal a double-edged sword effect of workplace ostracism and its contingency such that (1) supervisor ostracism reduces customers’ perceived control value in customer–agent coproduction through threatening service agents’ efficacy needs when the agents experience low servicing empowerment; (2) coworker ostracism enhances customers’ perceived relational value in coproduction through threatening service agents’ relational needs when they expect a long-term relationship with customers; and (3) customers’ perceived control and relational values increase their perceived service performance, and customer relational value also increases the amount of purchases. Our findings reveal that service agents’ workplace ostracism may actually help or harm customers’ service perceptions, depending on the source of ostracism. The results provide significant implications for how organizations can better manage employees’ perceived ostracism in the workplace and strategically improve customers’ experience in service coproduction with excluded agents.

Firms increasingly engage customers in idea generation (or ideation) to sustain their competitive advantages. Drawing from social interaction literature, this study adopts a social network perspective to investigate empirically how the characteristics (i.e., direction, size, and strength) of customers' online peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-to-firm (P2F) interactions, moderated by customers' past efforts to post ideas (i.e., past ideation participation), influence their likelihood of generating ideas in an idea crowdsourcing community. With four years of data from a popular online crowdsourcing site, this study demonstrates the significant impacts of P2P and P2F online interactions on customers' likelihood of subsequent idea generation. In particular, a potential double-edged sword of past ideation participation emerges: A high level of past ideation participation strengthens (weakens) the impact of P2F (P2P) interactions on customers' subsequent idea generation. These findings suggest implications for how firms can cultivate customers' online social interactions with peers and firms and enhance their capabilities for capturing the wisdom of the crowd.

Extant research confirms the importance of value cocreation through customer participation (CP), but relatively little is known about whether and how it creates an enjoyable experience for customers and service employees and the consequential outcomes of this positive affective experience. This study applies the concept of flow as an overarching framework and draws theoretical support from social cognitive theory, particularly its extension (i.e., the conceptual model of relational efficacy beliefs), to examine how customers and employees derive enjoyment from CP conditional on their perceived efficacy of themselves (self-efficacy [SE]) and their partners (other-efficacy [OE]) in financial services. Empirical results from 223 client–financial adviser dyads confirm that participation enjoyment, in addition to economic and relational values, mediates the impact of CP on participants’ satisfaction evaluations, with SE positively moderating CP's impact on participation enjoyment. The synergistic effect of SE and OE on participation enjoyment also differs for clients versus financial advisers: Even incongruent levels of SE and OE can enhance participation enjoyment as long as they help validate role expectations of the respective participants.

Celebrity endorsement is a salient executional strategy in china, where national celebrities often endorse more than 20 brands. This paper adopts a relational perspective to examine this research issue. The relational perspective is driven by three core chinese cultural values: collectivism, risk aversion, and power distance. The authors propose a model that postulates how celebrity-worship leads to value transfer that, in turn, affects brand purchase intent. Findings from a survey involving 1,030 respondents from a national panel of consumers, showed that consumer celebrity worship is a significant antecedent to endorser effects; over-endorsement by a celebrity is an important moderator; and the model is robust across both sports and entertainment celebrities.

Literature on empowerment as an internal marketing practice primarily documents positive effects on employees’ job performance, though increasing evidence suggests conflicting viewpoints. This study adopts an agency theoretical perspective to propose a workload mechanism, according to which the delegation of power from supervisors (principals) to service employees (agents) (i.e., servicing empowerment) is costly to employees and increases their perceived workload, which hampers their performance to serve customers. Using a laboratory experiment and a survey, this research reveals that the perceived workload and extant motivational mechanisms have conflicting effects on employees’ service performance. The former exerts a significant negative impact on tasks that involve conflicting principal-agent interests (e.g., handling customer complaints) but not on tasks with aligned principal-agent interests (e.g., organizational citizenship behaviors). Two control systems, performance appraisal (accurate and infrequent feedback) and principal-agent service goal congruence, mitigate the dysfunctional effect of perceived workload on employees’ service performance.

Virtual communities (VCs) represent popular social environments in which people interact by exchanging resources such as information, ideas, and advice about their common interests. Existing research lacks an explication of why people help others in VCs and how such voluntary behaviors drive subsequent attitudes (VC commitment) and behavioral intentions (online co-shopping). This article adopts resource exchange theory to examine how two routes of interactivity (structural vs. experiential) influence reciprocity and affect commitment and co-shopping. Using a netnography study and an online survey, the authors confirm the significant effects of structural and experiential routes of interactivity on reciprocity. Reciprocity has critical effects on social system maintenance by enhancing commitment to the community and intention to co-shop. The results also identify partially mediated relationships among various variables, which suggest that the effects of the experiential route on VC commitment and co-shopping operate partly through reciprocity.

Emergent perspectives in marketing highlight new opportunities for co-opting customers as a means to define and cocreate value through their participation. This study delineates and empirically tests hypotheses regarding the effects of customer participation (CP) on value creation and satisfaction for both customers and employees with different cultural value orientations in the context of professional financial services. Using data collected from 349 pairs of customers and service employees in two national groups (Hong Kong and the United States) of a global financial institution, this study examines how (1) CP drives performance outcomes (i.e., customer satisfaction, employee job satisfaction, and employee job performance) through the creation of economic and relational values and (2) the effects of CP on value creation depend on participants’ cultural value orientations. Promoting CP could be a double-edged sword for firms: CP enhances customers’ economic value attainment and strengthens the relational bond between customers and employees, but it also increases employees’ job stress and hampers their job satisfaction. Moreover, the effects of CP on value creation depend on the cultural values of both customers and service employees; this result implies that arranging customers and service employees with “matched” cultural value orientations could facilitate the creation of value through CP.

This study extends the existing satisfaction–trust–loyalty paradigm to investigate how customers’ affectionate ties with firms (customer–firm affection)—in particular, the components of intimacy and passion—affect customer loyalty in services. In a bilevel model, the authors consider customer–staff and customer–firm interactions in parallel. Through a netnography study and survey research in two service contexts, they confirm (1) the salience of intimacy and passion as two underrecognized components of customer–firm affection that influence customer loyalty, (2) the complementary and mediating role of customer–firm affection in strengthening customer loyalty, (3) significant affect transfers from the customer–staff to the customer–firm level, and (4) the dilemma that emerges when customer–staff relationships are too close. The findings provide several implications for researchers and managers regarding how intimacy and passion can enrich customer service interactions and how to manage customer–staff relationships properly.

Customer satisfaction and service evaluation research has examined the reference effect but largely adopted an expectancy–disconfirmation paradigm that focuses on referents centered on the product or service in question. This study examines two additional reference effects, alternative attractiveness and self-image congruity, and their interaction. The framework of multiple reference effects in service evaluations integrates insights from regret theory, the investment model of interpersonal relationships, and self-image congruity theory. An empirical study of a hairstyling service confirms that comparisons involving other-object and self-based reference points contribute significantly to consumer service evaluations. Self-image congruity has the most significant impact on both customer satisfaction and commitment judgments. In general, the negative effect of alternative attractiveness on both customer satisfaction and commitment becomes weaker as the level of self-image congruity increases; as long as consumers find a good fit between their self-image and the service image, they are less likely to consider alternative services. However, for consumers with high self-image congruity with the focal service, the presence of an attractive alternative may induce them to exhibit an enhancement bias or “play up” effect (i.e., report higher satisfaction with the focal service).

Fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs) have been widely used in many applications, However, they are usually implemented digitally by expensive digital signal processors (DSPs), and the performance is restricted by the sampling period. In this paper, an analog FLC implemented by a low-cost device is proposed. Through analog circuitry, the features of an FLC such as membership function shaping, rule inference and defuzzification are realized. The controller is successfully applied to regulate a PWM boost power converter with satisfactory performance.