Uncovering the Double-Edged Sword Effects of Customer-Employee Joint Collaboration on New Idea Generation

Collaborating with customers and employees has been widely discussed in the literature, yet few studies are devoted to its impact on creative performance. This project aims to examine the impacts of the customer-employee joint collaboration (“JointCol”), specifically in temporary workgroups context, on team ideation performance and thereby illuminating the underlying psychological processes. We build on the flow theory to propose that JointCol will influence ideation performance (enhances idea novelty, but reduces idea usefulness and volume) through the experience of team flow. We further take a contingency approach to propose that the mediation of team flow emerges only when intra-team efficacy variability is low or the team’s collective efficacy belief is high. Data from a field experiment (103 teams, 409 respondents) support our hypotheses. These results offer promising implications for theory and practices pertaining to new service or service innovation development processes.