| Summary: | Practitioners’ and scholars’ interest in the service-dominant logic of marketing has increased sharply in
the last decade (Vargo and Lusch 2004). Customer participation (CP), as one of the foundational
premises of this service-dominant logic, enables service employees to cocreate customize services with
customers to suit their needs (Auh et al. 2007; Chan, Yim, and Lam 2010; Yi, Nataraajan and Gong 2011).
Extant research on the impact of CP is considerable, but with a dominant focus on taking from an
extrinsically motivated perspective to examine the impact of CP on customer satisfaction or employees’
in-role performance through mechanisms of improved service quality, reduced costs, and enhanced
control. However, the question of how CP might drive customers’ citizenship behaviors has not been well
addressed. This question is important; firms experience remarkable challenges in their efforts to manage
customer participation and cultivate more citizenship behaviors would help enhance their competitive
advantage.
This paper uses social exchange and reinforcement theories to explore the mediating role of
interpersonal attraction, a crucial but under-researched relational construct that both parties can
develop during the co-production process, in the impact of customer participation on customer
citizenship behavior. Moreover, this research further examine the moderating roles of shared
interpersonal similarity and coproduction task outcome on the relationship between customer
participation and interpersonal attraction.
With a large-scale survey data collected from customer-designer dyads from an interior design institution
with multiple waves, results show that customer participation in the coproduction process with the
employee will increase their citizenship behaviors through enhanced interpersonal attraction toward the
employee. Particularly, such positive effect exists when the customer perceived a higher similarity with
the employee, as supported by the positive reinforcement theory. Nevertheless, the moderation of
perceived similarity is further altered by the coproduction task outcome such that the positive
moderating effect of perceived similarity with the employee only functions well when the coproduction
outcome is better than expected. This research extends the existing literatures in CP and value cocreation by studying customer citizenship behaviors as a more enduring and impactful outcomes for
firm’s profitability and sustainability, which represents an important step in the effort to examine value
co-creation processes more fully. It also enriches existing marketing literature by applying reinforcement
theory to investigate the impact of CP on the creation of interpersonal attraction and customer
citizenship behavior in a services context. Particularly, it explores the moderating roles of interpersonal
similarity and co-production task outcomes on customer citizenship behaviors. Taken together, this
research advances understanding of the complex relationship between CP and customer citizenship
behaviors by showing that CP is a necessary, but not the only condition, for developing interpersonal
attraction and customer citizenship behaviors and this process is moderated by other factors.
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