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

interactions (see Appendix Table A1) and a crucial research question remains unresolved:
In the IT service firms, how do engineers’ relational interactions among leaders and team
members influence their service innovation performance? To answer this question, this
study aims to build a research framework that addresses the social exchanges and social
influence associated with encouraging employees’ service innovation behavior. In turn,
this study proposes a dual mediation model, integrating both social exchange theory and
social influence theory, to delineate the effects of Empowering Leadership (EML) and

exchange quality (i.e., Team-member Exchange; TMX) on individuals’ service innovation
performance. The mechanisms under consideration within this model are value congruence
and felt obligation, providing a nuanced understanding of the aforementioned impacts.
Moreover, this study contributes to the service innovation literature by fulfilling several
research gaps.
The first research gap concerns the psychological mechanisms involved in the
process of the antecedents affecting employees’ innovation performance. Several studies

have investigated the direct impacts of internal support resources from a company (e.g.,
supportive leadership, relationship quality among members, and other supports from
management and relationship network). However, empirical findings have been mixed
regarding these links (e.g., Kim, Cheong, Srivastava, Yoo, and Yun, 2021; Kör et al.,
2021; Sykes, 2015), which mainly stem from overlooking the influence process. More
specifically, using only the individual performance as a unit of analysis, these previous
studies ignore the psychological mechanisms underlying the relationship between
antecedents and outcome variables. On the other hand, following social influence
theory, group members (i.e., employees and supervisors) can generate informational

and normative influence to affect others’ beliefs, preferences, and behaviors (Cialdini
and Goldstein, 2004). Other prior studies also find that when individuals belong to a
group, their thoughts and values are more likely to be affected by the consequences of
any decision the group’s members might make (Homburg et al., 2010; Liao et al., 2010).
Therefore, the current study deepens aforementioned prior results by concentrating on the
importance of understanding the underlying mechanisms behind the causal result.
Another gap pertains to the antecedents of engineers’ service innovation intentions.

First, some scholars have theorized that coworkers’ ties within workplace networks serve
as complementary resources that interact to influence their job performance (Cheong,
Yammarino, Dionne, Spain, and Tsai, 2019; Huang and Huang, 2021; Lin, Hu, and Shih,
2017; Ter Wal, Criscuolo, and Salter, 2023). While these studies adopt the concept of

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