Innovativeness and customer value co-creation behaviors: Mediating role of customer engagement

Customer value co-creation behaviors play a crucial part in determining customer satisfaction. However, few restaurant literatures have examined how innovativeness influences customer value co-creation behaviors. This research examined the influence of innovativeness on customer value co-creation behaviors to clarify the mediating effect of customer engagement. Survey data from 501 customers demonstrated that innovativeness and customer engagement are positively related to customer value co-creation behaviors. Moreover, customer engagement mediates the association between innovativeness and customer value co-creation behaviors. This research extends current knowledge on customer co-creation and examines the associations among innovativeness, customer engagement, and customer value co-creation behaviors. Research implications suggest strategic directions for restaurant managers in terms of innovative practices and customer relationship management.     

Value co-creation and customer citizenship behavior

Drawing on social exchange theory and the service-dominant logic framework this paper explores the association between value co-creation and the willingness to engage in customer citizenship behavior in the hospitality and tourism context. Tourism and hospitality firms are increasingly offering opportunities for co-production and value-in-use not only to increase revisit and repurchase intentions but also to benefit from manifestations of customer citizenship behavior such as customer feedback, advocacy, customer-to-customer assistance and tolerance in less satisfactory future services. The paper offers a building block for future work to investigate the causal relationship between the dimensions of value co-creation (co-production and value-in-use) and customer citizenship behavior.     

Hospitality employee and customer role in value co-creation: Personal,organizational and collaborative outcomes

With the growing frequency and importance of peer-to-peer service exchanges, the role of front-line employees for traditional hospitality service providers is changing. This study is the first to examine differences in value co-creation appraisal between front-line employees and customers. Respondents (N = 720) were equally assigned to either an employee or customer role and performed that role for four different online co-creation scenarios based on destination resort context: co-innovation, co-creation of marketing, co-production, and co-recovery. The results of between-within online experimental design were analysed using repeated measures ANOVA and PLS-SEM. Co-created value was appraised significantly higher by employees and positively affected well-being, satisfaction, and competitive advantage for both employees and customers. Co-created value served as a mediator between the four types of co-creation and outcomes only for customers. The study contributes to understanding roles as knowledge-based resources in value co-creation and provides practical implications for successful value co-creation in hospitality.     

Situational and personal factors influencing hospitality employee engagement in value co-creation

This study explores the situational and personal factors affecting hospitality employees’ engagement in the co-creation of value. The concept of value co-creation emerged from the general co-creation literature, and little research has assessed how situational and personal factors enhance our understanding of value creation. To explore these underlying factors, a qualitative study involving in-depth and focus group interviews was conducted at three luxury hotels in Hong Kong and Macao. The research findings indicate five situational factors and five personal factors impact cocreated value for hotel guests in the luxury sector. Insights are provided into the potential use of these factors to better manage employee engagement and the customer experience to facilitate value co-creation. The implications of the study and directions for future research are discussed.     

Understanding precedents for frontline employee turnover in luxury hotels: Emotional intelligence as a unifying factor

Current turnover research fails to serve the needs of an industry that is long plagued by employee turnover. Existing literature focuses more on evaluating bundles of human resource practices and fail to provide precise and clear guidance for practitioners. This study proposes that emotional intelligence (EI) unifies sufficient individual factors and organizational factors that affect employee turnover and serves as a single significant precedent for turnover. Data were collected from frontline employees at eight luxury hotels. The direct, indirect, and total impacts of employee EI on employee turnover were tested by structural equation modeling and bootstrap tests. The results suggest that EI has significant indirect impacts through the mediation of perceived organizational support, pay satisfaction and job burnout, and significant total impacts on turnover. Implication suggestions include integrating EI into the recruiting process for new employees and providing training opportunities for current employees to improve their EI.     

Co-creating value in hotels using mobile devices: A conceptual model with empirical validation

The service-dominant (S-D) logic paradigm is increasingly gaining ground within the scholarly literature and current hotel industry practice. The S-D logic purports that consumers are no longer passive receivers of firms’ value propositions, but rather interact with firms in service settings, thus co-creating value. Using data from a general population sample of hotel consumers from the U.S., this study developed and validated empirically a conceptual model that recognizes the central role of consumers’ degree of value co-creation in creating valuable service experiences using mobile devices in hotels. It was found that the mobile (m-)commerce habit influences the degree of consumer co-creation, which in turn influences the perceived value of co-creation behavior. In addition, the perceived value of co-creation was found to influence consumers’ perceived value of the hotel stay and intentions to stay in a hotel that facilitates co-creation via the mobile environment.     

Managing customer citizenship behaviour: The moderating roles of employee responsiveness and organizational reassurance

This study examines the influence of employee responsiveness and organizational reassurance towards customer citizenship behaviour (CCB) on building guest satisfaction, loyalty, and perceived value. The study considers insights from concepts in psychology including attachment theory, self-congruity theory, affect infusion model, and social exchange theory which are relevant to the problematics of CCB. The scenario-based experimental design used in this study focuses on one aspect of CCB identified in extant literature: the policing of other customers. In a hospitality context, guests voluntarily participate in safeguarding an organization's quality when they identify areas that may be impacted by opportunistic behaviours of fellow guests. This context is highly relevant in hospitality and tourism settings where the behaviour of one individual may directly impact the experience of another given the co-creation of experience in a shared environment. Both employee responsiveness and organizational reassurance were found to significantly moderate guest satisfaction, loyalty and perceived value.     

Customer co-creation of travel services: The role of company support and customer satisfaction with the co-creation performance

The tourism industry is characterized by high-contact services in which co-creation of customers plays a major role. This paper develops a conceptual model of customer co-creation of tourism services and empirically tests this model in a travel agency context. Applying a SEM-approach, company support for customers is found to significantly affect the degree of customer co-creation. The degree of co-creation further positively affects customer satisfaction with the service company, customer loyalty, and service expenditures. A test of the moderating effect of the customers' satisfaction with their own co-creation performance on satisfaction with the service company and on service expenditures suggests that those customers who are satisfied with their co-creation activities spend more on their travel arrangements, but that they are less satisfied with the company. Important implications for co-creation theory and practice in high-contact service industries can be derived.     

Mediated Effects of Customer Orientation on Customer Relationship Management Performance

ABSTRACT

Drawing on relationship marketing and management theory, the author examines how customer orientation can stimulate employee training and customer information processing capability when firms implement customer relationship management (CRM). The researcher also investigates how employee training and customer information processing affect CRM performance in light of customer satisfaction and financial performance. Restaurant data support the proposed model, which incorporated mediated relationships among customer orientation, training orientation, customer information processing, and CRM performance. The findings indicate that training orientation and customer information processing mediate the effect of customer orientation on CRM performance. The empirical results suggest theoretical and managerial implications for CRM implementation and strategies.     

Human value co-creation behavior in tourism: Insight from an Australian whale watching experience

This study explores and tests a comprehensive model of co-creation in creating value and tourist satisfaction. In addition to being the first study to empirically test the customer value co-creation behavior scale developed by Yi and Gong (2013), the present work adds to theory by revealing the importance of tourists' mental co-creation and employees' active participation in creating value and satisfaction for the customer. Factor analyses and econometric models of logit model and multivariable ordinary least squares regression are applied to a sample of 1024 whale watching tourists. The study finds that tourists' participation is more important in influencing their perceived value during the experience than their satisfaction. Employees' input is key to the experience in enhancing tourists' value and satisfaction. The main contribution of the study is the inclusion of co-creation behaviors from different human actors including tourists and employees. Opportunities for future research are outlined.     

Fostering corporate sustainability in tourism management through social values within collective value co-creation processes

Collective value co-creation is not fully explored in management research. The phenomenon of social value co-creation has not been investigated in detail either, particularly regarding sustainable tourism management. In our work, we investigate the role of social values within the collective value co-creation process, as a key factor for building sustainable tourism management practices able to generate sustainable benefits to all stakeholders. The study setting is Sardex, a complementary currency community based in Sardinia (Italy). By adopting a qualitative methodology, and through face-to-face interviews, the entrepreneurs’ relationships were analysed using dialogue, trust, and reciprocity as core factors of value co-creation within the hospitality and tourism firms grouped in Sardex. Particularly, we explored whether, and to what extent, reciprocity was the salient factor in the process of value co-creation. Findings show that social values, and especially reciprocity, are the backbone of value co-creation: they foster corporate social orientation, which brings together corporate social responsibility and sustainability, and represent our contribution to enrichen theoretical and practical perspectives in this multidimensional field.     

Real-time co-creation and nowness service: lessons from tourism and hospitality

Brands take advantage of technology, social media and constant connectivity to foster organic consumer engagement and interactions towards co-creating personalised customer service. Real-time service offers dynamic engagement with connected consumers. Brands in tourism and hospitality use technology to dynamically enhance consumer experience through co-creation. The integration of real-time consumer intelligence, dynamic big data mining, artificial intelligence, and contextualisation can transform service co-creation by mobilising recourses in the ecosystem. Nowness service emerges by dynamically engaging consumers in experience cocreation in real time. It has five interconnected characteristics that revolutionise the tourism and hospitality, namely: real-time, co-creation, data-driven, consumer-centric and experience co-creation.     

Applying Service Profit Chain model to the Korean restaurant industry

The purpose of this study is to empirically determine the relationship between employees’ constructs such as internal service quality, service ability, employee satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and customers’ constructs such as perceived value, customer satisfaction, customer trust, and loyalty. This relationship was studied by applying the Service Profit Chain model to the Korean restaurant industry. Results show that internal service quality has a significant effect on service ability, and teamwork/communication has a significant effect on employee satisfaction. Employees’ organizational commitment has a significant direct effect on the value perceived by customers. Ultimately, there is an indirect influential relationship between employees’ and customers’ constructs. Implications of these results are discussed, and possible limitations of the study are addressed.     

Intangible asset value of employee satisfaction in high-contact services

In this study, we utilize the employee online review data from Glassdoor to examine whether stock market capitalizes the intangible asset value of employee satisfaction for high-contact service firms. We hypothesize that in the hospitality and tourism industry, employee satisfaction can efficiently motivate employees to deliver high-quality service and improve the employee retention, thereby leading to greater shareholder value. Our finding is consistent with this prediction that stock market investors indeed incorporate the intangible value of employee satisfaction into the valuation models. In addition, we find that the value of such intangible asset manifests in firm’s subsequent profitability, resulting in improved return on asset (ROA). We further decompose ROA into profit margin and asset turnover to explore the pathways by which employee satisfaction affects shareholder value. We find that employee satisfaction can improve both profit margin and asset turnover for high-contact service firms. Overall, our study suggests that employee satisfaction can be an important intangible asset that contributes to the service firms’ long-term value.     

The impacts of complementary information technology resources on the service-profit chain and competitive performance of South African hospitality firms

The potential of information technology (IT) resources to empower employees, to shape customer service and contribute to the competitive performance of hospitality firms has received much attention. Yet empirical evidence has been lacking. This study draws on the resource-based view of the firm and the service-profit chain framework to develop and test a model of the effects of a complementary system of tangible and intangible IT resources on employee and customer service outcomes and on competitive performance. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 112 hospitality establishments operating in South Africa. Results revealed that the complementary system of IT resources has significant direct effects on competitive performance whilst its effect on customer service outcomes is fully mediated by employee outcomes. Results support the contention that hospitality service is information intensive. In addition to employees, tangible and intangible IT resources demand the attention of hospitality managers and their role in competitive strategy must be considered.     

Co-production versus co-creation: A process based continuum in the hotel service context

This paper reviews the theoretical underpinnings of co-production and co-creation and discusses these service production approaches in a hotel context. Based on a synthesis of the literature, we present a co-production to co-creation matrix and offer several propositions: (1) the co-production versus co-creation concepts create a continuum rather than a dichotomy; (2) service innovation and the customisation of service production are conceived as lying somewhere between co-production and cocreation on this continuum; and (3) the key factors that define a typology of service production types (co-production, service innovation, customisation, and co-creation) include the primary value-creation driver and customer involvement/dialogue type. We further discuss the benefits for hotels of moving from co-production to co-creation on this continuum. As one of the first papers to discuss co-creation in hospitality, it contributes to the field by providing specific theoretical and practical implications for how hotel companies can move from co-production to co-creation.     

Dealing with customer incivility: The effects of managerial support on employee psychological well-being and quality-of-life

This research examines the effects of customer incivility and manager procedural and emotional support on employee psychological well-being (PWB) and work quality-of-life (WQOL). Study 1 uses the qualitative critical incident technique to content analyze employee perceptions, finding that incivility affects employee PWB and WQOL. Based on the results of Study 1, a conceptual model examines a 2 (procedural support: high vs. low) × 2 (emotional support: high vs. low) between-subjects experimental design in both a hospitality and general service context. Results from Study 2 and 3 find that managerial procedural and emotional support significantly affect employee’s PWB and WQOL. There is also a significant interaction effect of emotional and procedural support on PWB and WQOL. The research builds upon the incivility, managerial support, psychological well-being, and quality-of-life research as well as provides important managerial implications for actions service firms can take to minimize the negative effects.     

Value co-creation behaviours from customer-to-customer interactions (CCIs) in recreational social tango experiences

ABSTRACT

Drawing on customer-dominant (C-D) logic, the main objective of this study is to examine value co-creation behaviours that emerge from customer-to-customer interactions (CCIs) in recreational dance experiences. In-depth interviews were held with 15 dance participants located in Chile, who take social tango classes. The findings identify seven CCI value co-creation behaviours, such as seeking and sharing information about the service with other participants, complying with service requirements and behaving responsibly towards other participants, developing personal interactions with other participants, helping and providing feedback to other participants, and finally being tolerant of and courteous to other participants. The findings of this study advances knowledge on value co-creation and can assist recreational services and dance school managers to develop more effective service strategies for improved customer experiences.     

Employee satisfaction,customer satisfaction,and financial performance: An empirical examination

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and to examine the impact of both on a hospitality company’s financial performance utilizing service-profit-chain framework as the theoretical base. Specifically, this study explores four major relationships: (1) the direct relationship between customer satisfaction and financial performance; (2) the direct relationship between employee satisfaction and financial performance; (3) the direct relationship between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction; and (4) the indirect relationship between employee satisfaction and financial performance. Furthermore, this study examines the mediating role of customer satisfaction on the indirect relationship between employee satisfaction and financial performance. Data for this study was collected from employees, customers and managers of three- and four-star hotels. Structural equation modeling (SEM) with a two-step approach was utilized to empirically test the proposed hypotheses and the relationships between the constructs. Findings suggest that while customer satisfaction has positive significant impact on financial performance, employee satisfaction has no direct significant impact on financial performance. Instead, there is an indirect relationship between employee satisfaction and financial performance, which is mediated by customer satisfaction.     

Determinants affecting comprehensive property-level hotel performance: The moderating role of hotel type

It is crucial for hotel managers to understand the main drivers of each property's financial performance. This study examines the key antecedents of both service-profit chain frameworks (customer and employee satisfaction) and strategic perspectives (size, customer mix) that influence a comprehensive hotel performance. The findings of this study show that customer satisfaction is a prominent driver of performance and that hotel size and customer mix also have significant effects on performance. This study also examines the moderating effects of hotel type on the following three determinants: customer satisfaction, hotel size, and customer mix and performance. The findings will offer useful insights to hotel chain firms and hotel investors who manage or own a portfolio of different hotel types.