Is Customer Participation in Value Creation a Double-Edged Sword? Evidence from Professional Financial Services Across Cultures

Abstract

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.