Servitization Strategy——the Moderating Effect Of Resource Integration Capability And Goal Gongrence

As the economy globalization trend turns out to be more and more obvious, the marginal profit and the revenue stability of manufacturing industry are maintaining decreasing and the needs of customers also keeps changing. The consumers'needs toward the pure product are no longer urgent, providing the product-relevant service is more important to consumers. In such a historical background, the change of both the industry environment and customer needs pose new challenges to the strategy management of manufacturing companies. The traditional manufacturing and production have been hardly maintaining the surviving and the developing of manufacturing firms, the innovation in products by manufacturing firms cannot fully meet the customer needs either. There are many manufacturing firms which were at the leading position in various industries, including some famous manufacturing firms at top 500, keeping going downhill roughly. The main reason of this phenomenon is that the companies cannot timely and sufficiently change their own manufacturing business model to initiatively adapt the change of customers needs under such situation. In recent years, the academic circle demonstrates great enthusiasm toward this problem, through qualitative research and empirical study, they found out that, in the situation that manufacturing industry keeps recessing, offering the services not only can create bonus value for customers, but also can prevent the imitation by the competitors, the manufacturing firms can change themselves to deal with the situation only by providing and renewing their own service business according to customer needs and the change of market environment.But nowadays in the background of manufacturing industry, while providing service offerings can bring the opportunities to manufacturing firms, it also hide the potential risks. Due to the limited resources and capabilities, and the existing pressure of the employees in firms during the servitization transition period, many manufacturing companies are hesitant when they provide the service offerings, the temporary decrease of the marginal profit and firm performance also can cause the marketing myopia in many managers of manufacturing firms. If there is no cooperation and support from the leadership in manufacturing firms, the companies can hardly follow the market change and effectively seize the marketing opportunities even they have high level of resources slack and management flexibility. Thus, the increase of the manufacturing firm's performance needs the leadership holding relatively strong servitization willings.As to the research about the relationship between the willingness of servization and manufacturing firm's performance, the existing papers about servitization only focus on the servitization willingness'direct impact on business performance, the boundary conditions needed to guarantee the business performance are neglected, in other words, what kinds of key situation variables are necessary to promise the manufacturing firms performance? What is more, the internal mechanism of the relationships between the servitizaiton willingness and manufacturing firm performances are mainly concentrating on the leverage of existing resources and knowledge, the increase of customer loyalty, the strategic dilution and the organizational conflict. On the basis of collection of servitization-relevant research, the author thinks the internal mechanism of the relationships between the servitizaiton willingness and manufacturing firm performances should be different from different perspective, furthermore, under different conditions, the impact also turns out to be different. In order to further explore the mechanism of the relationships between the servitizaiton and manufacturing firm performances, and the boundary conditions of this impact, this article starts from resources perspective to explore the internal mechanism of servitization's impact on business performance, and analyzes both combinative capabilities and goal congruence, tests whether these two variables can influence the relationship between servitization and performance.Thus, this article presents four hypothesis and one research framework on the basis of the collection of relevant researches. In order to prove the validity of these hypothesis and framework, the author acquire the necessary information by questionnaire from over 200 manufacturing firms and finish the factor analysis and regression analysis with AMOS 20.0 software and SPSS20.0 software. The research result shows the hypothesis and the framework are basically valid. Firstly, the author examine the relationship between servitization willingness and business performance on the basis of sample information, the result shows that the servitization can positively influence the manufacturing firm performance. Secondly, this paper add the resources investment in service business to the model, it turns out that the resources investment in service business can also positively influence the business performance, this variable intermediate the relationship between servitization willingness and business performance, the intermediation is complete. Thirdly, this article introduces the resource integration capability and goal congruence as moderate variables to further explore the boundary conditions of the relationship between servitization willingness and business performance. The empirical study results show that both resource integration capability and goal congruence can positively influence the resources investment in service business, and the interaction between servitization and either of them also turns out to be significant. This means, when the manufacturing firms hold servitization willingness, in order to improve the business performance and the success probability of servitization, the companies should focus more on developing their combinative capabilities and the level of goal congruence.On the basis of resource-based view, through combining the relevant theories of servitization, resource integration capability, goal congruence and resources investment in service business, this article deeply explores the relationship between servitization willingness and business performance, and the moderating effects of resource integration capability and goal congruence. From theory perspective, this research results not only discover the internal mechanism of the relationships between the servitizaiton willingness and manufacturing firm performances, but also fill the gap of the boundary conditions of this relationship, it has important theoretical contribution. From practical perspective, this article provides the confidence to the manufacturing firms which are in the process of servitization, acquire the leadership acceptance for servitization, and at the same time, it also guides the manufacturing firms to develop the specific resources and capabilities according to the market environment and their own conditions, which has important practical contribution. With regard to the shortcomings of this research, the author also expects to improve in the follow-up study.