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

their performance, determine the level of effort to exert, and decide how long they will
persist in the face of obstacles or challenges during the service creation and delivery
processes (e.g., Tierney and Farmer, 2002). Gong et al. (2009) argue that employees’
service innovation self-efficacy reflects their intrinsic motivation to engage in creative
activities, which in turn influences their innovation performance. In addition, group
and organizational level influences are also important for the innovation outcomes of
individuals (Chen et al., 2013). We suggest that future research should examine team-level

or contextual factors (e.g., team climate, team-efficacy, or team-level leadership), which
may also affect individual innovation performance. Third, while this study offers valuable
insights to deepen our understanding of engineers’ innovative behavior, our focus remains
on the relational resources within firms. It is important to acknowledge the existence of
other relationship resources in the workplace, such as the role of customer relationships in
innovation performance and the impact of varying degrees of customer participation. We
also recognize that the impact of EML on TMX warrants deeper investigation. In response

to the editor’s recommendation and inspired by Cheong et al. (2019), we incorporated a
new path into the original model (EML→TMX). After adding this path, we found that
the structural model evaluation displayed a satisfactory fit with the observed data, and we
identified a significant association between EML and TMX, suggesting that this area merits
further exploration in future research. Finally, our Taiwanese research context may limit
the generalizability of our findings: Farmer et al. (2003) argue that individuals’ thoughts
and behaviors diverge across different cultures, regions, and countries. It would be useful
to understand the effects of proximal factors on individual innovation performance in
different cultures. Thus, future researchers are encouraged to examine these linkages in

different cultural contexts.

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