Increasingly, transactions between firms and customers are typified by the co-creation of value, wherein customers play an active role in the development of new products and services. Over the past two decades, research on co-creation has flourished across multiple disciplines, largely highlighting its benefits for firms and customers. Importantly, though, while customer engagement in the creative process may be viewed positively by customers and improve organizational performance, it may not be experienced as universally positive by the service providers who must respond to it. To gain a more complete understanding of both the positive and negative sides of customer creativity, we take an approach-avoidance perspective to build a theoretical model explaining how and why customer creative behavior can lead to divergent responses by service providers. Specifically, we describe how creativity by customers can inspire service providers, driving them to act more prosocially toward customers in return. Simultaneously, customer creativity can cause performance anxiety in service providers, leading them to withdraw from their work. Adding nuance to these predictions, we draw from interpersonal complementary theory to explain why the approach-avoidance processes triggered by customer creativity should be contingent on service providers’ creative-role identity. Across an experience-sampling field study (Study 1), a critical-incident experiment (Study 2), and a scenario-based experiment (Study 3), our results largely align with our theoretical model (overall N = 647). We close by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our work.

中文翻译：

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论顾客创造力的接收端：来自回避和人际互补视角的见解


企业和客户之间的交易越来越多地以价值共同创造为代表，其中客户在新产品和服务的开发中发挥着积极作用。在过去的二十年里，关于共同创造的研究在多个学科中蓬勃发展，很大程度上凸显了它为公司和客户带来的好处。但重要的是，虽然客户对创意过程的参与可能会被客户积极看待并提高组织绩效，但必须对此做出回应的服务提供商可能不会普遍认为是积极的。为了更全面地了解客户创造力的积极和消极方面，我们采用接近-回避的角度建立了一个理论模型，解释客户的创造性行为如何以及为何会导致服务提供商的不同反应。具体来说，我们描述了客户的创造力如何激发服务提供商，促使他们以更加亲社会的方式对待客户作为回报。同时，客户的创造力可能会导致服务提供商表现焦虑，导致他们退出工作。为了给这些预测增添细微差别，我们利用人际互补理论来解释为什么由客户创造力引发的接近回避过程应该取决于服务提供商的创造性角色身份。通过经验抽样现场研究（研究 1）、关键事件实验（研究 2）和基于场景的实验（研究 3），我们的结果在很大程度上与我们的理论模型一致（总体 N = 647）。我们最后讨论了我们工作的理论和实践意义。