Study on Paths to High Level Servitization of Manufacturing Firms:Based on Method of fsQCA and Database of Chinese Listed Manufacturing Firms
Manufacturing servitization is one of the important approaches for a manufacturing firm to get out of development dilemma.High level of servitization,which refers to the manufacturing firms in the"product"as the core to"product+service"as the core of the servitization process,more emphasis on manufacturing firms to provide products and services integration solutions of the differences and/or value-added development stage and state.It will help a manufacturer to solve the problem caused by homogeneous competition via providing users with additional firm-specific value.However,the problem of which factors and how do their interactions to help a manufacturing firm achieve high level servitization is still unanswered.The extant literature has focused more attention on how a manufacturer's internal resources and capa-bilities influence the manufacturer to achieve high level of servilization with ignorance of the effect of the environmental factors.Moreover,most studies made efforts to identify the"net effect"of each of a manufacturer's internal factors on high level of servitization.However,as known to all,most phenomenon are the results of multiple factors'interaction.So does the high level of servitization for a manufacturer.In order to understand the phenomena of how high level of servitization to be achieved,and explore the causality com-plexity effectively,the research adopts a holistic view and the method of fuzz-set qualitative comparative analysis(fsQCA)to explore the antecedent configurations influencing a manufacturer to realize high level of servitization.Specifically,based on literature review and theoretical deduction,a manufacturer's internal and external factors were identified firstly.Data of Chinese listed manufacturers from CSMAR database was collected and 592 cases were maintained.Using fsQCA,which is known as its salient advantage in analyzing cause-effect relationship between the interaction of multiple factors and a specific result as it uses the thinking of set analysis of sufficient and necessary conditions,the antecedent configurations of high level of servitization of manufacturers were proposed.This research finds that,none of the internal or external factors is the necessary condition for achieving high level of servitization.It is the conjunction of internal and external factors that leads manufacturing firms to realize high level of servitization sufficiently,and there are three antecedent configurations for manufacturers'realization of high level of serviti-zation.According to different drivers to promote a manufacturer to implement servitization,the three antecedent configura-tions can be further clustered into two categories,namely,configuration of opportunity-pulling and those of competi-tion-pushing,the latter include a configuration of competence-based and a configuration of resource-aided-compe-tence-based.The fundamental role of dynamic capabilities,which include absorptive capacity and flexibility of human resources,has been found in all the three antecedent configurations for high level of servitization in manufacturers."Market experience"and"redundant resource"are alternatives of each other.What's more,the three antecedent configurations of non-high level of servitization of manufacturing firms are generally characterized by lack of external pressure and power,and insufficient internal organizational capacity(absorptive capacity,human resource flexibility).In this situation,even if there are some redundant resources or senior executives,manufacturing firms show the result of non-high level of servitiza-tion due to lack of"talent for resource deployment".It further verified that the driving force of the above high level of servitization is mainly the opportunity-pulling and the driving force caused by competitive pressure brought by the industry development space in the environment,and further indicated that if the competitive pressure and development space of the external industry are insufficient,even if the firm has sufficient redundant resources,it will not be possible for a manu-facturing firm to realize high level of servitization.Findings of this study contributes the theory of manufacturing companies'servitization by identifying two drivers and three antecedent configurations of high level of servitization in a holistic framework integrating a manufacturer's internal and external factors,which may give an effective interpretation for the complexity of causality in servitisation.Additionally,to improve the measurement validity of the construct of"servitization",new measurement of"servitization"by considering the width of servitization and depth of servitization as a whole has been developed.The future research can further use the multi period and multi linear growth QCA method to analyze and compare the difference of configuration solutions in each key period during the development of the research object,so as to obtain the dynamic and evolutionary regular pattern in the process of manufacturing firm servitization development.
servitization of manufacturing firmshigh level of servitizationstrategic decision frameworkfuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis(fsQCA)
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