earticle

영어

A recent significant change in business markets involves the increasing involvement of customers in new product development and service delivery processes. Encouraging customer participation may represent the next frontier in competitive effectiveness, and it reflects a major shift from a good-centered to a service-centered marketing logic. This new service-dominant logic views customers as proactive co-creators rather than as passive receivers of value and views companies as facilitators of the value co-creation process rather than as producers of standardized value. Therefore, a large body of marketing literature has focused on customer participation, creating a host of issues that require exploration. To increase our understanding of the positive sides of customer participation, it is essential to identify the leading factors of service customer participation in the service delivery process. Thus, this study examines how the service encounter dimension(service provider, physical surroundings, and other customers) influences different types of service customer’s perceived justice in a service environment, as well as the effect such justice perceptions might have on a customer’s willingness to participate in the service process, which increases service encounter satisfaction. In many services, customers themselves have vital roles to play in delivering and producing services and ultimately enhancing and detracting from their own satisfaction received. Thus, services outcomes cannot help being influenced by customers’ participation in service settings. The relationship between customers’ participation in the service delivery process and their subsequent satisfaction or perceptions of service quality has received much less attention than has each of these concepts separately. It is well known that customers’ satisfaction is directly related to what and how customers themselves contribute to service quality. Therefore, it should be said that customer participation has an impact on customer satisfaction. However, the fact that customer participation may have important effects on customer satisfaction has not been specified clearly. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of consumers’ service justice perception and participation behavior on relationship quality and relationship performance. To this end, 427 customers of major university hospitals in Korea were interviewed and asked to complete a questionnaire. Measurement properties and hypotheses are evaluated using multistep structural equation modeling with LISREL 8.53. A two-stage data analysis is performed to assess measurement quality of the constructs and test the proposed model and hypotheses. In the first stage, a confirmatory factor analysis(CFA) is performed to assess the measurement model. In the second stage, a series of structural path models is fitted to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that service provider has a significant effect on customers’ perceived interactional justice. We also found that physical surroundings have positive effects on distributive and procedural justice. Other customers have an effect on service customers’ procedural justice perception. Finally, the results indicate that customer participation in service delivery is an important mediator between customers’ justice perception and service encounter satisfaction. This study provides managerial implications on how to manage different dimensions of service encounter to increase customer participation via customer justice perceptions. To enhance positive outcomes, service organizations need to provide more customer-oriented service and increase customer justice perception for better performance, especially customer participation and satisfaction. This research also has various limitations. First, the study was conducted in a single service context. The level of customer participation will vary due to the type of service. Future research could explore the generalizability of the findings to other contexts. Second, the findings from this study have a cross-sectional design. Therefore it is not possible to draw conclusions about the causal relationships among the study variables. Longitudinal study designs are needed to examine the proposed processes.

한국어

최근 서비스 연구에서 대두되고 있는 흐름인 서비스 지배논리(Service-dominant logic)는 서비스 가치향상에 기여하는 공동생산자(co-creator)로서의 서비스고객 역할에 대한 중요성을 강조하고 있다. 본 연구에서는 서비스기업의 측면에서 통제가 가능한 서비스 접점을 크게 3가지 차원(서비스 제공자, 물리적 환경, 다른 고객)으로 제시하였다. 고객들은 이 3개의 차원과 상호작용을 통해 서비스에 대한 공정성을 인식하게 되며 서비스의 공정성에 대한 평가를 바탕으로 고객은 서비스의 참여행동여부를 결정하고 서비스 접점에 대한 만족을 형성하게 된다. 연구에서 설문조사를 실시한 대형병원은 서울 소재의 주요 대학병원으로 연구의 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 서비스 제공자와의 상호작용은 서비스 고객의 상호작용 공정성 인식에 긍정적인 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났으며, 물리적 환경과 고객의 상호작용은 고객의 분배, 절차 공정성과 유의적인 관계가 있는 것으로 나타났다. 그리고 다른 고객과의 상호작용은 절차 공정성인식을 고취시키는 것으로 나타났다. 둘째, 분배 공정성, 절차공정성 및 상호작용 공정성에 대한 서비스 고객의 평가는 고객의 참여행동에 긍정적인 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 마지막으로 서비스 고객의 참여행동과 서비스 접점에 대한 만족간에는 유의적인 정(＋)의 관계가 있는 것으로 나타났다.