Role constellations in value co-creation : a study of resource integration in an e-government context

Abstract

The contribution of the present thesis is describing and explaining how value is co-created by addressing customer-employee role constellations during service encounters. There is a specific focus on customers’ and employees’ resource integration when co-creating value. The thesis consists of five separate papers, one of which is a literature review and four are empirical papers. The empirical papers are based on data from the public employment service and the customs service inSweden. The thesis offers two main contributions; the first of which is to service research by expanding knowledge of resource integration and value co-creation using e-government as the empirical context for outlining customers’ and employees’ value co-creation. The second contribution concerns which roles customers and employees enact during resource integration when value is being co-created. It was found that the roles of the employees were; interactor; customer oriented party, co-creator, and empowered party, while a customer can have the role of information integrator, accessibility needer, dialogue keeper, and/or knowledge transferee. Based on these two contributions, the thesis outlines understandings regarding role constellations in value co-creation. The role constellations suggest that customers and employees enact roles that impact how their resources are integrated. Finally, the thesis contributes towards building a theory of value co-creation by proposing that the ten foundational premises of S-D logic, together with the four theoretical propositions and the role constellations presented in this thesis, should be seen as an approach to building a theory of value co-creation. Together, these three building blocks offer the following explanation as to what occurs when a customer and an employee co-create value: (1) The ten foundational premises focus on resource integration and value co-creation. (2) The four theoretical propositions offer the explanation that resource integration occurs in the context of roles since a role decides how to use the knowledge and skills. (3) The role constellations give concrete examples of how customers and employees integrate their resources to co-create value.

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