顾客参与对员工越轨创新的影响机制

The Influence Mechanism of Customer Participation on Employees'Creative Deviance

如何充分利用顾客参与激发员工创新性表现尚未得到很好的解答。基于压力认知评价理论,构建顾客参与影响员工越轨创新的中介调节模型,采用476份员工问卷研究发现,员工亲社会动机、组织支持感能够增强顾客参与对创新过程投入的积极作用,当亲社会动机和组织支持感都处于高水平时,顾客参与对创新过程投入的正向影响最大;创新过程投入正向影响员工越轨创新,亲社会动机、组织支持感和顾客参与的交互作用通过创新过程投入正向影响越轨创新。研究有助于丰富顾客参与和越轨创新的理论研究,并为企业实践者把握顾客参与、提升员工创新活力提供启示。

Prior research shows that effectively motivating employees'creative deviance is an important means to improve organizational innovation performance.However,the existing research on the antecedents of creative deviance mainly focuses on internal factors of the organization,and few studies pay attention to the external factors of an organization,such as how customer participation affects employees'creative deviance behavior.In fact,customer participation will make it easier for employees to have pro-customer creative ideas,and encourage employees to refine or even implement creative ideas without authorization,that is,to take creative deviance.Especially in the era when users'needs are paramount,creative deviance triggered by customers'participation will emerge and become more prominent,but previous studies have not investigated the relationship between them and failed to explain the situation of customer participation and how to stimulate employees'deviant innovation behavior.Hence,whether and how customer participation can affect employees'creative deviance remains to be further explored.Following the cognitive appraisal theory of stress,this study constructs a mediated moderation model of customer participation affecting employees'creative deviance.It aims to reveal the positive impact mechanism of customer participation on employees'creative deviance by analyzing the important role of prosocial motivation and perceived organizational support in changing the cognitive appraisal process of employees'participation in customers,and the resulting proactive response creative process engagement which stimulates the emergence of creative deviance behaviors.Using two-wave questionnaires,this study gets the empirical data of 476 employees and grassroots leaders from high-tech industries that attach great importance to providing customers with innovative products,encouraging employees to establish and develop relationships with customers,and normally involving high-level customer participation.SPSS 26.0 software is used to conduct the regression analysis to test the main effect of customer participation on employees'creative deviance and the mediating effect of creative process engagement;hierarchical regression,simple slopes analysis and process plug-in are then employed to test the moderating effects of prosocial motivation and perceived organizational support.The results of hypothesis testing show that firstly customer participation has a positive impact on creative deviance;secondly employees'prosocial motivation and perceived organizational support can enhance the positive effect of customer participation on creative process engagement,i.e.,when both prosocial motivation and perceived organizational support are high,the positive effect of customer participation on creative process engagement is stronger;thirdly creative process engagement positively affects employees'creative deviance;fourthly the interaction of prosocial motivation,perceived organizational support and customer participation positively affects creative deviance through creative process engagement.The theoretical contributions of this study are mainly as follows.Customer participation is found to be an important antecedent variable of creative deviance,which enriches the research on antecedent variables of creative deviance and the theoretical research on customer participation.Then it reveals the important boundary conditions under which customer participation can produce positive effects,and advances the understanding of the intervention research on customer participation's positive effects.This study further identifies and discusses the influence of creative process engagement on creative deviance,uncovers the behavioral process and internal mechanism of creative deviance,and expands the research perspective of the formation mechanism on creative deviance.The research results have certain guiding significance for how to transform customer participation into employees'innovative performance in management practice.While cultivating customer participation,enterprises should improve employees'pro-social motivation through training,promote good interaction between employees and customers,and strengthen employees'absorption of knowledge such as customer product experience and preference information;it is also important to provide employees with necessary organizational support,helps them to identify and refine customer needs,and encourages employees to make a challenging assessment of customer participation.On the other hand,it is essential to stress the importance of creative process engagement for the improvement of employees'creative innovation.Managers should properly guide employees to participate in the innovation process,strengthen the training of innovative logical thinking,and improve their ability to find and solve problems creatively.