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

performance can be moderated by several task and institutional dimension factors (Ozer
and Vogel, 2015); however, these moderators are not necessarily likely to have the
anticipated impacts. We suggest addressing this issue by further investigating personal
factors. Our findings reveal that the effects of interest in others’ well-being extend to
individual work behavior. Our results confirm that employees’ intention to engage in
innovative behavior is positively related to their innovation performance as assessed by
their direct supervisors; the relationship is particularly strong when employees are high on

other-orientation. As other-orientation is known to focus information search and processing
on group-level attributes, social cues, and consequences (Taylor et al., 2021), this study
exemplifies high other-orientation, rather than high self-orientation, facilitates employees’
innovative outcomes. That is, empirical verification of the specific link from innovation
intention to employees’ innovation performance, including alternative moderating effects
on the relationship between intention and performance, is required. In comparison with
prior works, our findings highlight the alternatives associated with predicting individual

innovation performance; moreover, employees’ characteristics can serve as an indirect
impetus for their willingness to transform these effects into performance.

5.2 Practical Implications
Our results generate several insights of value to managers. First, EML is a strong
driver of value congruence (informational influence) and felt obligation (normative
influence) for team members in terms of facilitating their innovation performance. The
work characteristics of the IT service industry involve mutual support and decision-
making flexibility (Barro and Davenport, 2019). Empowering leaders cannot merely focus

on each leader-member relationship: they need to facilitate their employees to develop the
individual capacity to better manage service projects, and to play supportive roles to focus
on each member’s individual needs. Additionally, based on social factors such as shared
affinities, interests, and values, leaders can establish core teams to further trigger emotional
connotation, particularly for members who crave deeper connections to their supervisors
or coworkers.
Second, in comparison with EML, our results suggest that TMX has a highly

significant impact on value congruence, but a less desirable effect on felt obligation;
that is, a high-quality relationship exchange may be extended to engineers to build up
their own resource networks. Management efforts in areas such as building task teams to
develop cooperation awareness, encouraging employees to participate in team activities

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