Abstract

Service innovation in the IT service industry involves a collaborative process occurring in actor-to-actor networks in which multiple actors such as team leaders, team members and clients all play a role. Integrating the theories of social influence and relationship exchange, the study examines how Empowering Leadership (EML) and Team-member Exchange (TMX) affect individual innovation performance through two particular psychological mechanisms—informational influence (value congruence) and normative influence (felt obligation). This study employs a multiphase and multisource survey from three major Taiwanese IT companies, and collects 282 individually matched pairs of engineer-leader dyads. Results reveal that value congruence and felt obligation mediate the effect of empowering leadership and team-member exchange on innovation performance through informational and normative influence routes, respectively. Furthermore, the moderating analysis demonstrates that when team members have higher other-orientation characteristics, there is a stronger association between innovation intention and innovation performance. Collectively, this study extends and deepens service innovation literature by modeling intricacies within service employees’ innovation decision processes, as well as providing suggestions for practitioners in B2B service contexts.  

Keywords

empowering leadershipother-orientationservice innovationsocial influencesteam-member exchange