When customer involvement hinders/promotes product innovation performance: The concurrent effect of relationship quality and role ambiguity
基于273家制造企业调查，发现客户参与与产品创新绩效呈倒U型关系，且关系质量与角色模糊的交互作用显著调节这一关系，为企业管理客户参与提供了策略参考。
Despite recent attempts to explain the nature of customer involvement, the question of how to curb its negative effect on product innovation has yet to be explored. This study focuses on the association between customer involvement and developers’ product innovation performance, and relies on relationship management theory and the role hazard perspective to explore what levels of relationship quality and role ambiguity, which coexist in partnerships, can turn ineffective customer involvement into a successful strategy. Using a survey of 273 manufacturing firms, we found an inverted U-shaped relationship between customer involvement and product innovation performance, and verified that the interplay of relationship quality and role ambiguity significantly moderate this association. We unpack the role of our moderators by developing a 2 × 2 matrix of high versus low levels of role ambiguity and relationship quality, and exploring the nature of the association between customer involvement and product innovation performance in each quadrant.