The Way Forward. Customer Co-production Behaviour

Abstract

The area of customer co-production behaviour has an impressive body of research devoted to comprehending a range of perspectives and theories related to this area. However, relatively little research have examined through the perspective of service dominant logic and underpinned self-determination theory to understand the customer co-production behaviour. The customer's role is active and participative because as an individual, a customer has the potential to act and influence the productivity and the outcome of service. Customer co-production behaviour is defined as the determination and willingness of a customer to participate actively in terms of his time and effort with the service provider in the service inception and production stages. This study applies the self-determination theory and an adapted version of the co-production model by Etgar (2008) to explain co-production behaviour in service provision. For the research, the context of building projects is appropriate to investigate this phenomenon because it is complex and time-related, hence requires customers’ perseverance to engage in the co-production process. A pre-study exploratory research, television programme analysis, interviews with the council officer and informants who have experience in building projects were conducted prior to determining the research model. Online and mail surveys were administered to a group of 275 participants who were willing to share their personal experiences in building projects. A customer's openness to experience, agreement and emotional stability traits has a positive effect on feeling competent about the activities that he/she wants to participate in, and he/she feels the self-efficacy to co-produce with the providers. The conscientiousness trait is relevant to susceptibility to control. The value anticipation construct has a relationship with agreement and conscientiousness. However, extraversion traits do not show any significant relationship with the customer autonomous motivation to participate actively in service provision. Next, autonomous motivation was shown to be a valid predictor to customer co-production behaviour. Finally, the findings also showed intrinsic rewards had a positive relationship as the outcome of customer co-production behavior. This study concluded that the self-determination theory and perspective of service dominant logic are useful in explaining the primary role of customers’ co-production behaviour in core product offering.