The Role of Customer-Task Fit between Service Interaction and Value Co-Creation: Evidence from China

Abstract

As a new value creation phenomenon, value co-creation has been widely concerned by academia and industry. Companies begin to invest significant resources and build information exchange platform to interact with customers in order to gain competitive advantage. However, prior research has ignored the underlying mechanism by which service interaction might improve value co-creation. Based on the person-environment fit theory, an attempt is made to investigate the intervening role of customer-task fit, which include demand-ability fit and needs-supply fit to explain the above linkage. With 509 customer questionnaires collected from China, the results showed that service interaction has both direct and indirect effect on value co-creation, and needs-supply fit partially mediate the relationship of service interaction and value co-creation. In addition, results supported the serial mediation model where service interaction was found to exercise its influence on value co-creation via demand-ability fit and needs-supply fit in a sequential manner.