Entrepreneurial Business Organization Service-oriented And Performance Mechanism

With the development of service economy, the importance of customer service has been continuously increasing and many firms begin to achieve their competitive advantages through providing excellent services. Service is the main source to create customer value, as well as an important way to make differentiation and to achieve sustainable competitive advantages. Nowadays, the phenomena including the service transition in manufacturing sectors and the service innovation in service sectors showed that organizational service orientation has played an important role in the development of firms. Though the importance of service is emphasized in practice, there is few related study in this field.This study is to explore how firms rely on organizational service orientation to achieve advantageous resources, to create customer value, and to improve sustainable competitive advantages in the entrepreneurial activities. The research mainly focused on the three following aspects. First, the study aimed to explore and validate the construct of organizational service orientation. Second, the study aimed to explore the organizational service modes and their characteristics in different context of entrepreneurial firms, and the effect of organizational service orientation on customer relation capital. Third, the study aimed to explore whether organizational service orientation can improve firms' entrepreneurial performance and the mechanism during the process.Study 1 is conducted to explore the key elements of organizational service orientation in the entrepreneurial context, using semi-structured interview and content analysis. The in-depth interviews were conducted with the entrepreneurs or the supervisors from top management teams in 18 different service firms. The content of the interview mainly focused on connotative meaning of service orientation through retrospecting the critical incidents of service practice in entrepreneurial activities. Based on the content analysis, the result indicated that the key elements of organizational service orientation were service adaptability, service innovation and service quality cultivation. The construct of organizational service orientation represents the key elements of quality, innovation and adaptability proposed in value space theory. Besides, it has enriched the research on service orientation at the organizational level and the construct has incorporated the innovation and fit element in addition to service-related elements defined in previous studies.Study 2 is conducted mainly to validate the construct of organizational service orientation. Based on the interview study, this study developed the scale of organizational service orientation through a series of rigorous research design and methods. Subsequently, questionnaire survey was conducted to explore and validate the construct of organizational service orientation. And the results of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that organizational service orientation has three dimensions of service adaptability, service innovation and service quality cultivation, and the 3-dimentioned construct is a reliable and stable construct. It made the groundwork for the further study. Besides, this study explored the characteristics of organizational service orientation in different contexts and also examined the effect of entrepreneurial orientation on organizational service orientation in entrepreneurial service firms.In study 3, two sub-studies were conducted. The case study mainly discussed the organizational service orientation modes and their characteristics in different context of entrepreneurial firms. Based on the in-depth interview, 3 cases were selected. By means of case depiction and analysis, it came up with three modes of organizational service orientation in entrepreneurial activities. They are niche mode based on service adaptability, innovation-oriented mode based on service innovation and quality-oriented mode based on service quality cultivation. The results indicated that the three modes have different characteristics and different effects on cultivating customer relation capital and achieving sustainable competitive advantages. In the subsequent questionnaire study, it examined the effect of organizational service orientation on customer relation capital. The results showed that organizational service orientation was highly related with customer relation capital. Besides, the findings also provided some evidence that the effect of organizational service orientation on customer relation capital varied in different entrepreneurial stages and different service sectors. The results also showed that organizational initiative moderates the relationship between organizational service orientation and customer relation capital. Therefore, the findings provide some implications for service firms to carry on organizational service orientation in entrepreneurial activities.Study 4 is conducted to explore how organizational service orientation can affect the entrepreneurial performance. This study has sampled 213 firms in entrepreneurial service firms and tested the function mechanism of organizational service orientation through the correlation analysis, multi-regression analysis and structure equation modeling. The results indicated that organizational service orientation has a positive impact on entrepreneurial performance, and customer relation capital is the mediating variable during the process. The study also examined moderating effect of entrepreneurial environmental factors on the relationship between organizational service orientation and entrepreneurial performance. The results showed that demand uncertainty moderates the relationship between organizational service orientation and entrepreneurial performance. But the moderating effect of competitive intensity was not supported. This compositive model revealed that how service firms may cultivate customer capital and achieve their competitive advantages.Finally, the theoretical progress and practical implications were discussed, as well as the limitations of these studies and the suggestions for future research.