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Service Innovation in the IT Service Industry: Social Influence and Relationship Exchange Perspectives

present study predicts that compared to self-oriented engineers, other-oriented ones will
enhance the impact of innovation intention on innovation performance.
Hypothesis 6: An engineer with high other-orientation will exhibit a stronger positive
relationship between innovation intention and innovation performance.

3. Methodology

3.1 Sample and Data Collection
The present study targets three major IT service companies in Taiwan. The IT service
industry is generally characterized by emphasizing on innovation regarding firm strategy
and employees’ innovation performance. Thus, having personnel knowledge and skills

to provide clients with tailored service will be the core ability for IT service employees.
That is, IT service firms have a tendency to focus on the joint application of specialized
competences (knowledge of IT domains) to generate value-creation practices (Sun, Fang,
Lim, and Straub, 2012). More importantly, for the purposes of this study, Taiwan’s IT
service industry represents a combination of cooperation, coordination, and innovation,
in which both internal exchange relationships (i.e., supervisors and team members) and
external resource exchanges (i.e., team members and customers) have an important effect
on individual task performance (Ford and Seers, 2006; Zhang and Bartol, 2010). Our
samples have customers from both the private sector, including finance, manufacturing,

medical care, and communications, and from the public sector, so we believe such
varieties can be representatives of the IT service industry in Taiwan.
In response to our research context and objectives, respondents must participate
directly in service delivery and interact with coworkers and customers frequently as they
provide tailored services. As such, all respondents are engineers, mainly from sales units
and customer service departments, working in project teams headed by team leaders
(supervisors). They are all familiar with the continuous evolution of this industry and the

need to devise and implement useful and effective solutions that meet customers’ diverse
requirements.
In line with prior research practice, we distributed the questionnaires in three phases
to minimize common method bias (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, and Podsakoff, 2003).
In the Phase 1 survey, we asked engineers about their views on the level of EML, TMX,
value congruence, and felt obligation displayed in their teams. In the Phase 2 survey, one

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