Research On The Internal Mechanism And Boundary Condition Of The Negative Effect Of Customer Participation

In recent years,with the quick development of social economy,more and more enterprises begin to encourage customers to participate in the creation,transmission and fulfillment of products or services.Moreover,consumers have developed from material demand satisfaction to psychological demand satisfaction,and get satisfied by participating in the production process of products and services.In other words,customer participation plays an important role in the daily life of consumers.At present,most studies focus on the positive effects of customer involvement from the perspective of employees and found that customer involvement can improve perceived service quality(Etgar,2008),control of service process and service outcome(Dabholkar,1990),strengthen customization of products(Bell et al.,2017),improving customer-employee relationship value(Chan et al.,2010),enhancing customer competence(Hajli et al.,2017)and improving customer achievement(Wirtz and Zeithaml,2018).Theoretical circles generally believe that customer participation has a positive effect on customer sentiment,experience and satisfaction.However,customer participation does not always bring positive effects in reality.For example,pleasure and excitement are not always there when consumers participate in the production of products or services,but complaints and dissatisfaction.On the one hand,with the deepening involvement in the production process of products or services,consumers play the dual roles of customers and employees,taking on part of the work that should be undertaken by employees,which requires consumers to invest more time and energy,leading to their energy exhaustion and role overload.On the other hand,lacking of product knowledge and literacy,being unfamiliar with roles and service processes,consumers are easy to get consumers' cognitive ambiguity,resulting in tension and discomfort.In addition,when the employees' instructions received by consumers conflict with their own internal requirements,they will also have the perception of role conflict.Under these circumstances,consumers are likely to feel tired and thus affect their satisfaction.Thus,customer participation turns out to be a "double-edged sword",which not only has a positive effect,but also has a negative effect.Therefore,how to effectively utilize the positive effect of customer participation and restrain the negative effect has important practical significance for modern enterprises.However,the theoretical research field has not paid enough attention to the negative effects of customer participation,and potential negative effects of customer participation have drawn broad attention,including losing their sense of rights and control,emotional labor and so on(Xanthopoulou,Bakker,Oerlemans,2018).Considering why customer participation reduces customer satisfaction,existing research pays more attention to the impact of boundary conditions,and lacks of research on the intermediary mechanism of how customer participation affect customer satisfaction.The contradiction between theoretical circles and reality about the effect of "customer participation" has always been an unresolved problem.With the increasingly of customer participation in society,what effect "double-edged sword" will produce,what is the connection with customer satisfaction,what mechanism it contains and how enterprises should restrain the negative effects of customer participation are demanding prompt solution.Based on role theory and burnout theory,this paper focuses on the following aspects from the perspective of customers: first,from the perspective of role theory,to demonstrate whether customer participation has a negative effect.Second,discuss the possible influence path and internal operation between customer participation and customer satisfaction.Third,to explore whether there is a moderating mechanism between customer participation and customer satisfaction.This paper combs and summarizes the existing literature on "customer participation" in detail firstly,and systematically discusses the role theory and related variables.Basing on this,the theoretical framework of this paper is put forward,and through theoretical deduction,the first group of research hypothesis is put forward: the relationship between customer participation and customer satisfaction,as well as the intermediary effect of customer roles and customer burnout;the second group of research hypothesis excavates the negative effects of customer participation when the first group of hypothesis is established,and verified corresponding regulation mechanism and the impact of the regulation from the level of interaction among individuals,enterprises and relationships.Built on commercial bank financial customers,this paper obtained 520 questionnaire survey and 620 second-hand data method as valid research samples.Through regression analysis,variance analysis of interaction effect,structural equation model and other methods,the theoretical framework and related research hypothesis were empirically analyzed.In the end,main conclusions,theoretical contributions and research significance are discussed and the future research directions are prospected according to the limitations of this paper.By empirical test and theoretical analysis,here comes the main conclusions: Firstly,customer participation have negative effect on customer satisfaction and indirect negative effect on customer satisfaction,which is transmitted through other variables and factors by intermediary variables;secondly,role pressure plays a mediating role in customer participation and customer satisfaction,while customer burn-out plays a conductive role.Specifically,on the one hand,customer participation will improve individual role stress perception,while customer role stress perception will directly and negatively affect customer satisfaction;on the other hand,customer role stress will negatively affect customer satisfaction by customer burn-out indirectly.Thirdly,this paper interprets role stress from three dimensions: role ambiguity,role conflict and role overload,and verifies that there are differences in the impact intensity between customer participation and the three dimensions.Among them,customer participation has the strongest negative impact on role ambiguity and weakest impact on role overload.Fourthly,the moderating mechanism between customer participation and role pressure-customer satisfaction is explored in three levels(individual,enterprise and interaction).It is found that collectivism orientation,customer education strategy and customer orientation weaken the negative effect of customer participation on role pressure.This study actively expands the theoretical and situational research,which is embodied in the following aspects: first,it tries to use role theory and burnout theory to reveal the possible negative influence of customer participation on customer satisfaction,and makes a positive attempt to open the "dark box" between customer participation and customer satisfaction.Secondly,this paper attempts to study the internal mediating mechanism of customer satisfaction damage caused by customer participation from a unified theoretical perspective,which further enhances existing understanding of customer participation.Third,it expands the research simulation.Previous studies on burnout theory focused on the internal situation of enterprises,choosing employees as research subject.However,this study introduced it into the external situation of enterprises,taking customers as the research object to discuss the role of customer burnout between role pressure and customer satisfaction,expanding the applicable scope of the burnout construct and improving its explanatory power.