The Comparison of Two Different Organizational Mechanisms to Facilitate the Value Co-Creation

Abstract

With the transformation of economic change, companies have gradually transformed their mode from the traditional one-way of goods-dominant logic to interactive two-way of service-dominant logic, which is known as value co-creation. It gives us a good opportunity to answer the basic research question of corporate change: Why are the employees willing to participate in value co-creation and facilitate the corporate change? We design a research framework which reflects the two contradictory theoretical assumptions–self-actualizing theory and rational organizational theory; and to explore the influence of two extremely different leadership styles:servant leadership and authoritarian leadership on value co-creation. Additionally, based on social exchange theory, the variables of implicit reciprocity (collective strategic vision) and extrinsic rewards (perceived organizational justice) were selected as two moderators to further investigate the relationship between leadership style and value co-creation under different situations. A total of 397 valid questionnaires from 91 groups were collected and hierarchical linear regressions were adopted for statistical analyses. The results showed a positive association between servant leadership and value co-creation and a negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and value co-creation, which demonstrated the impact of value co-creation on organizations from different leadership styles. Moreover, based on social exchange theory, this study identified implicit reciprocity and extrinsic rewards as two distinct moderators of the relationship between leadership styles and value co-creation; and finally, this study underscored the particularly interesting finding that the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and value co-creation is weakened when supervisors adopt authoritarian leadership styles and employees perceive lower organizational justice.