Celebrating Success: Klaus Schoefer, Nima Heirati and Markus Blut

Congratulations to Prof Klaus Schoefer and his co-authors Dr Nima Heirati and Prof Markus Blut on the recent acceptance of the paper : “The Dark Side of Customer Participation: When Customer Participation in Service Co-Development Leads to Role Stress”, Journal of Service Research.

This study proposes that the changing role of customers who actively participate in service co-development can cause role stress and negative feelings, which may, in turn, reduce customer satisfaction and the perceived value of participation. Using a video-based experiment, behavioural lab experiment, and field study, greater CP is found to lead to heightened role stress, including role conflict, role overload, and role ambiguity. These adverse effects occur contingent on customers’ prior participation experience and firm-provided support. Furthermore, role stress effects vary across service co-development types depending on (a) the scope of the task (i.e., open task, closed task) and (b) the beneficiary of participation (i.e., customer, general market). Specifically, adverse effects are stronger for open than for closed tasks, and they also tend to be stronger when the beneficiary is the general market rather than the individual customer. These findings emphasize the need for more cross-context theorizing in customer participation research. Managers should consider these adverse effects and implement measures that reduce role stress.