Despite service productivity’s scholarly prominence and practical relevance, past research in marketing has primarily adopted isolated perspectives from which disjointed empirical findings reign supreme. As the acquisition of knowledge about service productivity accelerates, the collective evidence becomes more interdisciplinary but also more fragmented. This study uses a meta-analysis to integrate the substantial empirical record on service productivity. We formulate hypotheses on the moderators of service productivity-determinant relationships and meta-analyze 77 articles, relying on 81 independent samples with a cumulative sample size of 30,238 participants to test our predictions. Our meta-analysis provides empirical evidence that service quality and internal efficiency must be considered jointly, not in isolation, to maximize profitability. Thus, relying on one aspect in isolation is less appropriate for measurement purposes and might not lead to positive outcomes. This important finding should concern service scholars and managers because falling profit margins require service firms to move beyond the traditional manufacturing productivity that separates service quality from internal efficiency and consider service productivity as a profitability concept. In sum, our findings provide a viable model to explain the main service productivity determinants and moderating variables, offering valuable insights for practitioners that aim to deliver cost-efficient service quality and promising future research directions.

This publication-based dissertation covers research on service innovation and service productivity over eight chapters. The first and second chapter provide an introduction into service innovation and service productivity as key elements of a firm’s ability to gain competitive advantages. The third chapter is a systematic literature review that structures research published on service productivity relying on 190 articles. The research offers a new conceptualization of service productivity by emphasizing it as an open and customer-inclusive process that transcends the service producer–customer divide. The fourth chapter is a meta-analysis which analyzes the factors influencing service productivity by relying on 77 articles, 81 independent samples, with a cumulative sample size of 30,238 participants. The study explicates that productivity measurements should equally account for service quality and cost aspects to either reconcile the conflicts or leverage synergies between the two and thus determine the service productivity effect more accurately. The fifth chapter is a quantitative empirical paper (N=554) that explains how individual political behavior affects new service development at the customer interface. The study shows that political behavior has a positive impact on extra-role behavior, thereby allowing to gain deeper insights into customers’ needs, indicating that political behavior is not an exclusively dysfunctional phenomenon. The sixth chapter is a multiple case study (based on 27 cases) that investigates how service innovation’s core concepts must be designed to be reinforcing and mutually supportive with the firm’s service productivity strategy. The study shows that firms are more likely to gain competitive advantages if they link multiple innovation configurations that achieve fit with the firms’ productivity strategy. The seventh chapter is a mixed empirical study that combines qualitative interview data (42 semi-structured interviews) with quantitative questionnaire data (n =125) to shed light on the underlying mechanisms that enhance innovation implementation effectiveness. The study’s results emphasize that achieving high and consistent use of innovations requires organizations to focus on organizational members and their individual characteristics, rather than on organizational design. The eight chapter summarizes the contributions of this dissertation as well as its limitations and potential directions for further research.

Ensuring that innovations are implemented organisation-wide remains a critical business challenge for organisations. This study identifies how organisations can improve the effectiveness of innovations and specifies the effects of innovation implementation antecedents and capabilities. By applying a mixed method approach, using data from 42 semi-structured interviews and 125 questionnaire participants, we develop a new framework for understanding the mechanisms that underlie and enhance effective innovation implementation. The results emphasise that achieving high and consistent use of innovations requires organisations to focus on organisational members and their individual characteristics, rather than on organisational design. Additionally, implementation leadership serves as a central mediator to explain the framework’s relationships. Furthermore, a middle management-driven approach that combines implementation leadership and dialogue facilitates the effective implementation of innovation. In conclusion, our study contributes to innovation implementation research by presenting a framework to guide future research, whilst helping practitioners to implement innovations more effectively.