Challenge or Hindrance? The Impacts of Customer Participation on Employees’ Ambidextrous Innovative Behavior

As the most direct contact with the turbulent market environment, employees’ innovative behavior is of great significance to the realization of corporate innovation performance. Existing literature on this topic has only discussed the positive or negative impact of customer participation on employees’ innovative behavior and does not converge to a definite conclusion, even less is known about the mediating mechanism and boundary condition in the relationship between customer participation and employees’ innovative behavior. In order to resolve the inconsistence in current researches, this paper stands on the perspective of stress and argues that challenge stress or hindrance stress evaluated by employees may have a significant impact on their subsequent innovative behaviors. This paper also proposes the mediation effect of stress as well as the moderation effect of regulatory focus. In order to test the hypotheses of influence mechanism of customer participation on employees’ exploratory innovative behavior and exploitative innovative behavior, this paper uses data from 271 junior staffs in high-tech firms, which is conducted by a two-stage design, and examines the proposed hypotheses. The empirical results show that:（1）Customer participation promotes exploitative innovative behavior and inhibits exploitative innovative behavior;（2）Challenge stress and hindrance stress play a partial intermediary role in the relationship between customer participation and exploratory/exploitative innovative behavior;（3）Regulatory focus moderates the relationship between customer participation and challenge stress/hindrance stress, and further moderates the mediating effect of stress/hindrance stress between the relationship of independent variable and two dependent variables.Theoretically, this paper integrates the debate in the previous literature on the relationship between customer participation and employees’ innovative behavior, and proves the different impacts of customer participation on employees’ exploratory/exploitative innovative behavior. Through the theoretical perspective of work stress, this paper argues that mediating variables between customer participation and employees’ exploratory/exploitative innovative behavior are challenge stress and hindrance stress. The moderating role of regulatory focus is examined to give evidence for explaining the boundary conditions of the influence of customer participation. In practice, this paper points out that enterprises should consider guiding customer participation within a certain range; supervisors should always pay attention to the perception of the subjective stress formed by employees in their work; and companies should also pay attention to identifying the personal characteristics of different employees and manage them in different ways.