Different roads to servitization success – A configurational analysis of financial and non-financial service performance

Much servitization research is ambiguous regarding its conceptualization of servitization success and the results are often inconclusive or even contradictory. The present study argues that this is because servitization success is understood best as a multidimensional, causally complex phenomenon, and adopts a configurational approach. The purpose of this study is to shed light on prominent, but inconclusive success factors, their interdependencies, and their causal role in leading to servitization success. A state-of-the-art fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is applied to a sample of 143 German manufacturing companies. The complex relationships between focus of the service offering on services supporting the product and services supporting the clients actions, the existence of a separate service organization, decentralization of decision making, management commitment to services, service orientation of corporate culture, and financial, non-financial, and overall service success are disentangled. A service oriented corporate culture, decentralized decision making, and management commitment to services are identified as necessary for servitization success; 3 configurations as sufficient for servitization success and 3 configurations as sufficient for a lack thereof. These findings paint a more realistic and multifaceted image of the causal relationships underlying servitization success, thus yielding useful suggestions for the management of servitizing businesses.