Customers As Contributors and Reliable Evaluators of Creativity in The Service Industry

Journal of Organizational Behavior
J. Organiz. Behav. 29, 949–966 (2008)

Published online 10 March 2008 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.522
Customers as contributors and

reliable evaluators of creativity in
the service industry
NORA MADJAR1* AND ROWENA ORTIZ-WALTERS2
1
Department of Management, School of Business, University of Connecticut, Connecticut, U.S.A.
2
Department of Management, Lender School of Business, Quinnipiac University, Connecticut, U.S.A.
Summary Using hair stylists, we examined the nature of creativity in a service setting and the impact of
customers as part of the social context for employee creativity. We also assessed whether
customers could serve as reliable evaluators of creativity. To do so, we collected data from
multiple sources: service providers, supervisors, and customers. Results demonstrated that
customer input and customer affective-based trust made significant, positive, and independent
contributions to service-related creativity. Moreover, customers in the service industry proved
to be reliable raters of employee creativity, compatible with supervisors. Finally, input and
trust were associated differently with service-related and organization-related creativity.
Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Introduction
Creative ideas make a substantial contribution to organizational innovation, effectiveness, and survival
(Amabile, 1996), and numerous studies have demonstrated that the social context, defined as the social
influences and individuals’ broader social interactions (Woodman & Schoenfeldt, 1989), positively
affects creativity (Frese, Teng, & Wijnen, 1999; Madjar, Oldham, & Pratt, 2002; Oldham & Cummings,
1996). While services comprise the largest sector of the U.S. economy (Derby, 2005), most of the
research on the influences of context on creativity to date has been conducted in product-oriented
organizations such as research and development (R&D) units or manufacturing firms (e.g., Andrews &
Farris, 1967; Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Tierney, Farmer, & Graen, 1999) and has dealt primarily
with the role of leaders, supervisors, and coworkers (George & Zhou, 2007; Kimberly & Evanisko,
1981; Shin & Zhou, 2003). Nevertheless, relationships are not homogeneous; they vary in their content
and intensity (Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003). Customers have expertise, interests, and relationships
with service providers that are likely to vary significantly from those of supervisors, coworkers
(Saparito, Chen, & Sapienza, 2004), family and friends. Also, because customers may be viewed as
* Correspondence to: Nora Madjar, Department of Management, University of Connecticut School of Business, 2100 Hillside
Road Unit 1041, Storrs, CT 06269-1041, U.S.A. E-mail: nora.madjar@business.uconn.edu
Received 28 June 2006

Revised 16 May 2007
Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 16 January 2008
950 N. MADJAR AND R. ORTIZ-WALTERS
‘‘co-producers’’ of the service, their presence, evaluation, and feedback add key elements to the social
context in service-oriented organizations that are absent in product-oriented firms (Bowen & Ford,
2002; Eddleston, Kidder, & Litzky, 2002). Precisely because of these differences, we examine the
impact of customers on employee creativity in the service sector, as we cannot assume that the effects
upon creativity from the social context will be identical to those in product-oriented organizations. In
doing so, we contribute to the research on creativity by expanding the range of socio-environmental
factors that can influence employees’ generation of unique and new ideas.
Given that service employees engage in extensive interactions with customers and sometimes invest
emotionally in the relationships (Price & Arnould, 1999), we employ a contextual approach to
creativity, specifically a social contextual perspective (Amabile, 1996; Shalley & Gilson, 2004) to
examine how customers could impact the creative performance of service employees. According to the
social contextual perspective of creativity (Amabile, 1996; Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993),
creativity does not happen in a vacuum but is influenced by the contextual setting. The social context
for creativity refers to the characteristics, dimensions, and conditions of the work environment that are
social in nature but that are not part of the individual (Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004) and that have the
potential to enhance or inhibit employee creativity (Woodman & Schoenfeldt, 1989). Examination of
the social context is important, as it has been suggested that creativity must be recognized as a product
not only of the individual who generates an idea but also of the environment where the idea is produced
(Harrington, 1990). This is because the setting sometimes provides the ‘‘ingredients’’ for creativity,
including the presence of interesting problems, novel techniques, and perspectives to apply to the
problem, norms encouraging the sharing of ideas, and avenues of communication between people with
complementary abilities (Amabile, 1996; Harrington, 1990). Thus, to understand what makes
employees in a service setting creative, we should take into account providers’ relationships with their
customers and the role(s) of the customers in shaping the social context for creativity in service
organizations.
In light of this conceptual framework, we investigate customers as part of the social environment that
both supports and nurtures creativity and that has the potential to offer input and informational
resources (Yoon, Seo, & Yoon, 2004). In addition, Simonton (1984) proposes that social factors play a
role both in developing a person’s creative potential and, just as importantly, in determining acceptance
of a creative idea. The relevance of the social context for the evaluation of ideas is also present in some
other creativity theories (Amabile, 1996; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999; Sternberg & Lubart, 1991).
Therefore, in addition to considering how customers can influence creativity as part of the context, we
examine them also as subjective evaluators of employees’ creative performance.
First, a social contextual approach suggests that in order to be creative, employees should feel safe
and supported in their workplaces (Madjar et al., 2002; Oldham & Cummings, 1996). This is important
because engaging in creativity carries the risk (Shalley & Gilson, 2004) of rejection or criticism, and in
a service setting the potential to lose business from clients. Customer trust in the employee is
recognized as an essential component of the social context in service settings (Price & Arnould, 1999).
It can help to foster a supportive environment (Clegg, Unsworth, Epitropaki, & Parker, 2002), which in
turn may stimulate creativity (Edmonson, 1999). Therefore, we examine customer trust in the service
employee and attempt to demonstrate how it can raise the comfort level of employees in order to
motivate experimentation.
Second, it has been proposed that creative individuals are influenced by diverse interpersonal
relationships that shape their social context (Gruber, 1988). Customers, who are not members of the
organization or engaged in the occupation, could bring the perspective of an outsider (Menon & Pfeffer,
2003). Thus, they have the potential to bring unique information and stimulate creativity by raising new
problems or needs (Lee, Yang, & Yu, 2001; Perry-Smith, 2006) or by discussing issues that are
unrelated to the service being provided.
Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 29, 949–966 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/job
CUSTOMERS AND CREATIVITY 951
A final goal of this research is to examine the validity of customers’ ratings of service employee
creativity and to compare and contrast them with supervisors’ ratings. When no objective measures
exist, ratings of creativity in most field studies have been provided by a single supervisor (e.g., Oldham
& Cummings, 1996; Tierney et al., 1999; Zhou & George, 2001). However, an interesting dilemma
exists in service organizations: Time spent with a customer may mean that employee behavior and
performance are not always observed or coordinated by management (Van Dyne, Jehn, & Cummings,
2002). As a result customers, as the actual consumers of the creative product, should be able to evaluate
the creativity of service employees and their assessments should matter for the establishment
(Eddleston et al., 2002). Despite this, no study has yet examined creativity from the perspective of the
customer. In addition, the lack of availability of multiple judges does not allow the assessment of
inter-rater reliability and has been considered a major limitation in the measurement of creativity in
previous organizational behavior research (Shalley et al., 2004).
We examine these issues among a sample of hairstylists and their customers, as the characteristics of
this particular setting allow us to appropriately test our research questions. First, the job of the
hairstylist requires a certain degree of creativity, for example, in changing the appearance of a client.
Being creative in the services they provide should allow stylists to respond more precisely to the needs
of different client groups such as older versus younger customers or curly- versus straight-haired
clientele. Second, clients and service providers have been found to develop long-term valued
relationships built upon trust (Gwinner, Gremler, & Bitner, 1998). In our study, participants are
engaged in service relationships where the customer sees the same hair stylist over time and there is
continuity in the service. As these are not casual relationships, it is reasonable to suggest that
hairstylists are entrusted by their clients to make creative changes to their appearances. Lastly, the
service delivery process involves extensive contact with customers (Nickson, Warhurst, & Dutton,
2005; Van Dyne et al., 2002). Often, the client is seen by the employee for a number and variety of
services at each appointment (e.g., coloring or styling). Considering that this is a highly interactive
process, it allows for input from both hairstylist and client (Price & Arnould, 1999). Given the nature of
these service encounters, research would suggest that customers are a key component of the social
context for hairstylists (Conlon, Van Dyne, Milner, & Ng, 2004). In what follows, we examine
specifically how trusting relations with customers and informational input from them facilitate the
creative performance of individual stylists and whether customers can reliably evaluate stylists’
creativity.
Theoretical Background
Creativity and the social context in the service sector
Following earlier work (e.g., Amabile, 1996; Shalley et al., 2004), we define creativity as the
development of ideas about outcomes, products or solutions that are judged as (a) original and
(b) potentially useful. More specifically, in the context of providing services, a product or procedure
should be not only novel and original but also have some practical value and benefit for customers
(Sethi, Smith, & Park, 2001). Thus, both ‘‘novel’’ and ‘‘useful’’ are important and necessary
characteristics for qualifying an idea as creative in a service setting. In the current context, the nature of
the work done by hairstylists allows them to express creativity in many different aspects of their jobs.
When they are assuming the role of hairstylists, they can engage in the generation of new styles for
different clientele (e.g., career/professional look vs casual look for stay-at-home moms) or offer useful
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solutions for distinct customer needs (such as helping clients with diseases and illnesses cope creatively
with hair problems). In other words, they can express their ‘‘service-related creativity.’’ When
performing a task not directly connected to the service they provide but rather focusing on the
establishment, employees can make creative suggestions for improving the appearance of the salon
itself, such as the display of hair care products, or propose changes for scheduling, coordination or
supply ordering and organization. These later examples imply that in addition to providing creative
services to customers, employees may engage in ‘‘organization-related creativity’’ by making changes
and improvements to the establishment. As such, we examine two forms of creativity in our study:
service-oriented and organization-oriented.
Because creativity is constructed through an ‘‘interaction between producer and audience’’
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1999, p. 314), it can be argued that customers are an essential part of the social
context for employees who work in a service setting. Therefore, according to the social contextual
perspective (Amabile, 1996) they may have the potential to influence the creativity of service providers.
To examine how this can be done, we base our choice of customer variables on the commercial
friendship framework from the marketing literature (Price & Arnould, 1999). This framework proposes
that when relationships with customers are characterized by intimacy, reciprocity, loyalty, and
self-disclosure they can have positive effects on work-related outcomes, including performance,
quality, loyalty, and customer satisfaction (Price, Arnould, & Deibler, 1995). Combining the insights
and conceptual arguments of the social contextual and commercial friendship frameworks, we argue
that trust and input from customers influence creativity of service providers by producing a supportive
and intellectually stimulating work context, which helps to increase employees’ creativity-relevant
cognitive processes (Amabile, 1996; Edmonson, 1999) and motivation to be creative (Amabile, 1996).
We explore each of these relationships in more detail in the sections that follow.
Customer trust and employee creativity
Trust has been defined in the literature as the willingness to accept vulnerability based on positive
expectations of the intentions or behaviors of another (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995; Rousseau,
Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer, 1998). Trust is considered multidimensional (McAllister, 1995) and for this
study, we focus our attention on affective-based trust, sometimes called relational trust (Rousseau et al.,
1998; Saparito et al., 2004). This is grounded in beliefs and expectations of interpersonal care and
concern among individuals (McAllister, 1995). Our choice in this type of trust reflects theoretical
reasoning that studying emotionally-based trust is more predictive than other forms of trust in
examining outcomes of personal relationships characterized by a high degree of interaction and contact
(Bigley & Pearce, 1998), as is often the case in relations between providers and clients.
How could customers’ trust in service employees influence creative performance? Creativity
research shows that individuals produce more novel and useful ideas if they believe the situation
encourages such behavior (Parnes, 1964). Customers who affectively trust their hairstylists usually
show concern for the feelings and needs of the employees. That is, trust creates a social context
characterized by a sense of security, comfort, and safety (Clegg et al., 2002; Edmonson, 1999;
Mumford & Gustafson, 1988). Under these circumstances, the stylist may be less likely to worry about
negative criticism by the customer that can undermine his or her desire to provide new and better
services (Amabile, 1996). Rather, the stylist may feel encouraged and free to explore and ‘‘play’’ with
various hair styles and to find creative solutions to a customer’s hair problems (e.g., adding
semi-permanent shine to dry, permed hair). She may even suggest radical changes to the client, such as
cutting her long hair very short for a season or trying a new coloring technique, such as ‘‘chunking’’.
Moreover, there is some marketing research which suggests that service providers are more likely to
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invest more into the relationship when clients trust them (Webber & Klimoski, 2004). This could
include expending extra time and effort in exploring alternatives to the regular service provided,
thereby contributing to creative outcomes.
In summary, following the logic of the social contextual approach, customers’ trust may stimulate
the creativity of hairstylists by providing a safe and supportive social context, thereby encouraging
them to experiment more. Thus:
Hypothesis 1. Service employees with higher levels of trust from customers will exhibit a higher
level of service-related creativity.
Customer input and creativity
In addition to fostering a trusting and relaxed work environment, the social contextual perspective of
creativity suggests that interpersonal relationships are associated with the availability of diverse
information and suggestions (Amabile, 1996; Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003), and that the generation of
creative ideas increases as one is exposed to differing viewpoints (Kanter, 1983; Sternberg & Lubart,
1991). In this respect customers, external to the organization (Sethi et al., 2001), could provide
information and advice (Yoon et al., 2004) that creates a cognitively stimulating social context.
Although clients may not be the only or the major source of input and information for creative ideas,
service jobs provide a great degree of personal contact with them (Thomas & Griffin, 1989). Therefore,
their involvement and participation are often required (Edvardsson, Haglund, & Mattsson, 1995),
making them relevant and valuable informational resources (Menon & Pfeffer, 2003). Moreover, while
customer input may involve the suggestion of new ideas formulated by the clients themselves, in
the current research we are interested more in the sharing of information and insights that may be linked
to creative idea generation by the stylists, not so much in the creative ideas of the customer.
Interactions with customers may influence the social context for creativity by contributing new and
potentially useful information, thereby arousing the employees’ creativity-relevant cognitive
processes—in other words, by providing ‘‘input’’ for creativity. We define customer input for
creativity as information that involves any knowledge, ideas, hints, or perspectives provided by
customers that may help the service employee in generating creative ideas. More specifically, customer
input does not need to involve task-related new knowledge specific to styling hair or already formulated
creative solutions. The client may just ask questions or present issues or problems completely unrelated
to the service or task at hand that initially may not be seen as relevant or new, but that may still create an
intellectually stimulating social context and trigger idea generation for the stylist. For instance, an
interior decorator could mention some problems with color contrasts on walls and the issue may
activate a thought process for the stylist about how to use low-lights and high-lights together to create
new hair coloring options.
Customer input may also represent different perspectives (e.g., Pelled, Eisenhardt, & Xin, 1999) that
could initiate divergent thought processes for the stylist, encouraging him or her to connect concepts
from an unrelated field (Paulus & Yang, 2000; Paulus, Larey, & Dzindolet, 2001) thereby facilitating
the generation of creative outputs (Leonard-Barton, 1995). For example, a construction worker could
present a unique new perspective by sharing information with the stylist about some new cutting
techniques that he had to learn at work. The stylist may then begin thinking about how some of these
techniques could be applied to hair, such as combining two different types of shears that allow short and
long strips of hair to be cut simultaneously, hence achieving a layered look. We therefore see how,
according to the social contextual perspective, customer input may influence the level of cognitive
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stimulation in the social environment and the stylists’ creativity-relevant cognitive processes, in turn
promoting creativity.
Hypothesis 2. Service employees who receive a higher level of customer input will exhibit a higher
level of service-related creativity.
Customer trust and input for creativity
So far we have discussed how a customer’s trust in the service employee and customer input for new
ideas, independently, might influence creative performance. But there is some research (e.g., De Dreu
& West, 2001) suggesting that while creativity is stimulated by the introduction of diverse ideas and
perspectives, individuals are most likely to give their input freely only when they feel safe enough to
make suggestions—that is, having the confidence to feel valued and not rejected if they explore it
further (Edmonson, 1999; Shalley & Gilson, 2004). The social contextual perspective also supports this
connection between the safety of the context and its ability to provide cognitive stimulation. New ideas
and information create the feeling of uncertainty in individuals, as they represent disturbances of
established routines and processes (Albrecht & Hall, 1991). Therefore, only individuals who know and
trust each other are likely to discuss unshared information (Albrecht & Hall, 1991; Wegner, Erber, &
Raymond, 1991). In uncertain contexts, individuals generally gravitate toward those they have a strong
relation with (Shah, 1998) and as the intensity of relationships increases so do helpful discussions and
involvement (Albrecht & Ropp, 1984), in turn exposing individuals to new knowledge and approaches.
Thus a combination of cognitive stimulation from customer input and support and safety from customer
trust may be needed to achieve greater creativity (Amabile, 1996). As such, we argue that customer
trust may also play a role in the input–creativity relationship.
A high level of trust in a relationship encourages the sharing of unique information (Nebus, 2006).
Therefore, we expect that creativity-enhancing input provided by customers will increase as they feel
more at ease with their service providers. Additionally, employees will be more receptive to input if
they regard it as friendly and welcoming. Therefore, employees that are trusted by customers are more
apt to acquire the creativity-relevant skills needed for the development of unusual ideas.
On the contrary, if customers do not trust their service providers, no matter how diverse the
information these people possess, most of their communication will be concentrated on common
knowledge. These customers will not be willing to provide input that stimulates creative performance,
and the information exchanged may actually restrict instead of enhance the stylist’s creativity.
Therefore, we believe that when trust creates a supportive and encouraging social environment, the
innovative ideas resulting from the social context (specifically, the customer input), will be most
beneficial.
Hypothesis 3. Customer trust in the service employee will moderate the relation between customer
input and creativity such that when customer trust is high, customer input will have the strongest
effect on service-related creativity.
Up to this point, we discussed how customers’ input and trust create a social context that feels safe to
employees, encouraging them to think creatively. The jobs of service providers demand creativity not
only in client-oriented tasks, but also in overall contributions to the establishment such as scheduling,
administration, and pricing (Van Dyne et al., 2002). We believe it is important to distinguish between
the types of creativity needed for these two categories of activity, as this distinction may have
implications for the degree of influence the customer might have on the social context for service
providers.
DOI: 10.1002/job
Though customers comprise a part of the social context for creativity, they are not necessarily
involved in other work-related issues such as salon maintenance, supply ordering or training. As
suggested by Madjar (2008), the influence for creativity will be stronger when the source of that
influence is closer to the situation at hand. In other words, the customer is directly involved with the
hairstyling task, but not with other job responsibilities such as coordination with coworkers. This would
suggest that customers’ role in the social environment may have a stronger influence on the immediate,
or proximal, rather than the distal social context for hairstylists’ creativity. Specifically, their influence
in terms of trust should make a greater contribution to creativity in providing the service than to other
work-related creativity. As far as customer input is concerned, we also expect it to have more influence
on the immediate task at hand (the hairstyle), as the client’s physical presence and direct involvement
will make it more salient as a source of insights than when other work-related creativity is involved, in
which the customer is not an active participant in the task. As such:
Hypothesis 4. Customer trust and input will have a stronger relation to service-related creativity than
to organization-related creativity.
Methods
Sample and procedures

We conducted the research in mid- to up-scale beauty salons from the northeastern United States.
Salons were selected from the Paul Mitchell website based on proximity to researchers. Only Paul
Mitchell salons were contacted to assure that employees received comparable levels and types of
training regarding appropriate conversational topics and provided similar services (e.g., cutting,
coloring, and make-up suggestions). For participating in the study, stylists and customers were told that
they would be entered into sweepstakes to win a $50 gift certificate.
A total of 176 stylists from 14 salons, whose owners expressed interest in the study, participated in
the survey. The sample of participating hair stylists corresponds to a response rate of 78 per cent from
all stylists in these salons. The participants were mostly women (92 per cent) with a mean tenure of
6.7 years in their organizations and an average age of 34.3 years. We received a total of 432 completed
questionnaires from customers, who were then matched to participating stylists with between 2 and
8 customers per stylist (an average of 2.5). Customer response rate was 50 per cent. Ninety-four per
cent of the customers were women, and the average customer age was 44 years. Managers indicated
that the participating employees and customers were representative of those in their salons. Moreover,
we compared the demographic and job profiles of the participants to all employees in the salons and
found that they were very similar.
Three types of data were collected on site, with all sources providing their data on the same day. First,
we asked the receptionists in all salons to distribute surveys to the customers coming to see each stylist
that day. We chose a random day for the data collection hoping to produce a random sample of
customers, representative for each service employee. The customers’ questionnaires included items
measuring trust in the stylist and rating of the stylist’s creativity. Next, stylists completed
questionnaires at their workstations or in the employee lounges. These questionnaires included items
that measured input from customers and demographic characteristics. Before they completed the
questionnaires, employees were assigned a code number and were assured that all information would
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be kept confidential. Finally, the authors met individually with the supervisors of all stylists. The
supervisors/salon owners (N ¼ 14) completed questionnaires assessing the creativity of each stylist.
Measures
Customer trust
Customers were asked to rate their affective trust in the service provider with five items adapted from
McAllister’s (1995) affective trust measure and rated on a scale that ranged from ‘‘strongly disagree’’
(1) to ‘‘strongly agree’’ (7). A sample item was: ‘‘I have a sharing relationship with my hairstylist; I can
share my ideas and feelings.’’ Given that we had several customer responses for each stylist, an
inter-rater agreement (median rwg) score was calculated in order to justify aggregating scores from
clients to create one measure of customer trust in stylist. The median rwg value of 0.94 (range between
0.56 and 0.98) showed good within-group agreement, indicating that customers’ levels of trust in a
particular stylist were highly consistent. We believe that this measure reflects the general trusting
climate and atmosphere that clients create for a particular stylist, which justifies its aggregation to the
stylist’s level.
Customer input
This construct was measured with six items based on the work of Madjar (2008). Items were rated on a
scale of (1) ‘‘strongly disagree’’ (7) to ‘‘strongly agree’’. A sample item was: My customers often
contribute new ideas for styling hair. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to validate the items
and the factor structure. As expected, the results yielded only one factor with eigenvalue of 4.30
that accounted for 73 per cent of the variance. All item loadings on that factor were 0.68 or above. We
averaged item scores to form a customer input for creativity scale with acceptable reliability (a ¼ 0.71).
Creativity
Consistent with earlier studies (e.g., Madjar et al., 2002; Zhou & George, 2001), we defined creativity
and asked both the supervisors and all the customers to rate their stylists’ creativity. The consensual
assessment technique (Amabile, 1996), in which two or more judges rate the overall creativity of each
outcome, is based on the argument that people can recognize creativity when they see it, for research
has suggested that both ‘‘experts’’ and ‘‘non-experts’’ in a domain should be able to provide reliable
ratings of creativity (Amabile, 1996). Although they do not belong to the organization, customers are
usually the consumers of the creative product and could judge its creativity compared to other products
in the same field or industry. Therefore, their ratings concerning creativity should be as reliable as those
of the supervisors.
We adapted five items measuring creativity, derived from Baer and Oldham (2006) and Zhou and
George (2001) that we considered suitable for the salon settings. The items measured whether a
particular stylist: (1) suggests creative ideas that might improve working conditions in the salon; (2)
comes up with creative ideas to problems at work; (3) suggests new ways of styling hair; (4) produces
very creative work; and (5) is a good source of creative ideas.
To provide a solid basis for comparison, we wanted customers to rate stylists’ work-related creativity
only in areas of which they had enough adequate knowledge and information. In a preliminary study,
we asked 2 managers, 7 stylists and their 13 customers, currently present in one beauty salon, to
indicate with a ‘‘Yes’’ or ‘‘No’’ response whether they believed customers were sufficiently
knowledgeable to provide an informed judgment of the stylists’ creativity on each of the 5 items.
Among our 22 participants, 100 per cent agreed that customers could adequately evaluate item 3; 95 per
cent—item 4; 50 per cent—item 5; and only 27 per cent thought that customers are knowledgeable
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enough to evaluate items 1 and 2. To be conservative, we kept only the 2 items (#3 and #4) that were
considered suitable for customer evaluation by 90 per cent of our 22 judges for obtaining the customer
rating of creativity. We asked the supervisors to rate stylists’ creativity on all 5 items. Upon further
reflection, the items retained for the customers’ rating appear to represent more service-related
creativity, while the remaining items pertain more to organization-related creativity.
Consistent with earlier studies (e.g., Madjar et al., 2002; Zhou & George, 2001), we defined
creativity and asked the supervisors and all of the customers to rate their stylists’ overall creativity on
the above two (for customers) or five (for supervisors) items. Both supervisors and customers rated the
items on a scale that ranged from (1) ‘‘never’’ to (7) ‘‘constantly’’. Exploratory factor analyses
demonstrated that supervisors clearly differentiated between the two types of creativity (service-related
and organization-related). The two factors explained 79 per cent of the variance and the items had
factor loadings of 0.80 and above on the appropriate factors and no cross-loadings higher than 0.22. We
calculated two supervisor creativity indices by averaging: (1) the scores of the two items from the
supervisor (a ¼ 0.88) for a service-related creativity rating and (2) the scores of the other three items
from the supervisor to form an organization-related creativity index (a ¼ 0.94). Since large groups of
stylists were rated by the same supervisor, to assess the effect of the supervisor on the measure, we
performed analyses of variance. The results suggested that there were no significant differences among
supervisors in how they rated their employees’ creativity on the two measures (service-related F (13,
125) ¼ 1.62, n. s.; organization-related F (13, 125) ¼ 1.19, n. s.).
The reliability of the scale for the customers was acceptable (a ¼ 0.71) and we calculated inter-rater
agreement (median rwg ¼ 0.78 with a range between 0.51 and 0.89) to justify aggregation across
customers. Customer and supervisor service-related creativity ratings were significantly correlated
(r ¼ 0.54, p < .01), a correlation higher than average for multiple source ratings (Conway & Huffcutt,
1997). Supervisor ratings of organization-related creativity were also positively and significantly
correlated with the supervisor ratings of service-related employee creativity (r ¼ 0.49, p < .01).
Demographic characteristics
To reduce the likelihood that employees’ demographic characteristics would confound the relations
examined in this research, four personal characteristics were measured and controlled in substantive
analyses: gender (1—male; 0—female); age (in years), organizational tenure (in years); and education
(1—elementary school to 7—graduate degree).
Organization membership
As expected, because of our choice of similar establishments, there were no mean differences between
salons on any of the variables, so we decided that controlling for establishment in subsequent analyses
was not necessary.
Analyses and Results
Relations among the measures
Table 1 provides descriptive statistics and correlations for all measures included in the study. Of the
four demographic variables, age was significantly correlated with customer input—older employees
received more input from their customers. Customer input showed positive and significant relations to
our three measures of creative performance (customer ratings of service-related creativity, supervisor
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Table 1. Correlations, means, and standard deviations

Variable Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1. Gender 0.08 0.27 —

2. Age 34.45 11.13 0.12 —
3. Education 4.03 1.50 0.11 0.12 —
4. Tenure 6.69 6.51 0.14 0.51** 0.16* —
5. Customer input 4.48 0.90 0.09 0.18* 0.09 0.14 (0.71)
6. Customer trust 5.06 1.23 0.16 0.05 0.13 0.05 0.04 (0.94)
7. Service-related 5.12 .87 0.00 0.04 0.04 0.05 0.20** 0.20** (0.71)
creativity (customers)
8. Service-related 5.07 .88 0.02 0.01 0.06 0.04 0.23** 0.16* 0.54** (0.88)
creativity (supervisor)
9. Organization-related 4.52 1.54 0.07 0.04 0.01 0.12 0.21** 0.13 0.38** 0.49** (0.94)
creativity (supervisor)
Note: Values in parentheses are internal consistency reliabilities.
N ¼ 171.
*
p < .05; **p < .01.
ratings of service-related creativity, and supervisor ratings of organization-related creativity).

Customer trust was positively and significantly correlated with the measures of service-related
creativity but not with organization-related creativity.
As the measures of customer trust and customer ratings of creativity came from the same customer
survey, we decided to explore the risk of common method bias before testing our hypotheses involving
these variables. The correlation between the two variables was not significant and not extremely high
(r ¼ 0.20). This was supplemented by running a Harman’s single factor test—the most commonly used
test to discover common method bias (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). Essentially, we
conducted exploratory factor analysis on all of the items used in the customer survey. The exploratory
factor analysis showed that there were clearly two factors responsible for the explained 77 per cent
variance. The items for the two variables (customer trust and creativity rating) had factor loadings of
0.69 and above on the appropriate factors and no cross-loadings higher than 0.21. These results,
together with the fact that the two variables were measured with different scales (one of the options for
avoiding common method bias) gave us the confidence to use the two scales together in subsequent
analyses.
Customer input, trust, and creativity
To test our hypotheses, we conducted three separate hierarchical multiple regression analyses with the
following dependent variables: (1) customer ratings of service-related creativity; (2) supervisor ratings
of service-related creativity; and (3) supervisor ratings of organization-related creativity.1 In step one,
we introduced into the equations the four control variables (gender, age, education, and tenure)
1
As the participants in the study came from 14 salons, we first checked the adequacy of a hierarchical linear model (HLM) that
takes into consideration the variance both between and within separate salons. As a pre-condition for such analysis, a null model
was assessed in HLM to partition the variance of the dependent variable into within and between components. From this null
model, the ICC(1) value indicated that only a negligible 1% of the variance in creativity (x2(13) ¼ 15.48, n.s.), with (s2 ¼ 0.61;
t ¼ 0.01), was between groups and the rest was within groups. This result, together with the fact that all variables were at the
individual level of analysis, did not justify the use of HLM; thus regression was used instead.
DOI: 10.1002/job
Table 2. Results of hierarchical linear regression analysis

Organization-related
Service-related creativity Service-related creativity (supervisor)
Variables (customers) I creativity (supervisor) II III
Step: 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3
Gender 0.04 0.00 0.01 0.02 0.01 0.00 0.10 0.08 0.09
Age 0.19* 0.25** 0.24* 0.08 0.14 0.13 0.08 0.13 0.12
Education 0.13 0.08 0.09 0.14 0.10 0.11 0.00 0.03 0.02
Tenure 0.14 0.11 0.10 0.09 0.07 0.06 0.22* 0.20* 0.19
Customer input 0.20** 0.21** 0.23* 0.24** 0.21* 0.22*
Customer trust 0.26* 0.26** 0.20* 0.20* 0.14 0.14
Customer Input Customer Trust 0.03 0.01 0.01
R2 Total 0.05 0.15 0.20 0.03 0.11 0.12 0.05 0.11 0.12
R2 Change 0.05 0.14 0.01 0.03 0.08 0.01 0.05 0.06 0.01
F Total 1.67 3.60** 3.63** .98 2.60* 2.44* 1.51 2.40* 2.30*
Note: Entries are standardized beta coefficients.
N ¼ 136.
*
p < .05; **p < .01.
followed in step 2 by the measures of customer input and customer trust, to assess the independent
contribution of each to creativity. We entered the interaction term in the last step. Results are shown in
Columns I and II of Table 2.
As shown in Table 2, both variables made positive, significant, and independent contributions to both
measures of service-related creativity, providing strong support for Hypotheses 1 and 2. Thus, the
higher the level of customer input and the more customers trust their service employee, the greater
the stylist’s creativity. This means that service-related creativity, whether rated by the supervisor or by
the customer, is associated with customer input and trust.
Customer trust was expected to interact with customer input in explaining creativity (H3). In
particular, we expected that when customer trust was high, customer input would have the strongest
impact on creativity. To test for this moderation effect, we followed procedures suggested by Aiken and
West (1991). After centering our independent variables, we introduced into a hierarchical regression
the control variables, the main effect variables, and the linear two-way interaction. This interaction was
not significant, and H3 was rejected.
Finally, while customer input was significantly and positively associated with both service- and
organization-related creativity (Table 2, Column III), customer trust did not make a significant
contribution to the later dependent variable. To perform a more rigorous test of the difference in the
relationship between customer trust and input and each type of creativity we followed procedures
outlined by Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken (2003). Whether the difference in magnitude of the
relationship between trust or input and each type of creativity is statistically significant is indicated by
the significance of that antecedent’s beta weight in a regression equation where the dependent variable
is a variable representing the difference between organization-related creativity and the standardized
predicted value of service-related creativity as derived from regression equations using the same set of
independent variables. Results from these analyses indicated that indeed the relationships between
service-related creativity rated by the supervisor and customer trust was significantly stronger
compared to the relationship between trust and organization-related creativity, while the one for input
was not statistically different (b ¼ 0.23, p < .01; b ¼ 0.15, n.s. for trust and input, respectively).
These results partially support Hypothesis 4.
DOI: 10.1002/job
Discussion
Previous research suggests that creativity is important in product-oriented firms and it shows that the
social context in which employees work, especially interactions with supervisors, coworkers, family
and friends could have a positive impact on creative performance (see Shalley et al., 2004 for a review).
In this investigation, we brought this line of research a step forward by exploring whether relationships
with customers, specifically in a service context, also mattered. Toward this goal, we examined the
main and multiplicative effects of customer trust and customer input on both service-related and
organization-related creativity of service providers. This was also the first study to use and compare
multiple subjective ratings (supervisors and customers) to measure creative performance—a
contribution to the management literature that could potentially facilitate the measurement of creativity
in different organizational contexts and concurrently provide some additional insights for the role of the
customer in the service industry.
First and foremost, results demonstrated that the involvement of customers is a critical factor
associated with service employee creativity. That is, input from customers and customer affective trust
in the service employee made independent, statistically significant positive contributions to our
measures of creativity. Specifically, higher levels of customer input and trust were associated with
higher ratings of service-related creativity by both customers and supervisors. Although researchers
in marketing have long suggested the importance of customer relations (Leonard-Barton, 1995; Von
Hippel, 1986), this work typically focused on the significance of these relationships for the organization
as a whole, not so much on their impact for service employee outcomes such as creativity. Therefore,
this study makes an important contribution by demonstrating that customers, as a group of outsiders to
the organization, have the potential to influence the social context and contribute to employee creativity
by providing input and by trusting their service providers. Given these findings, one major practical
implication is that management of service-oriented organizations should recognize the value of the
customer as a potential source that can be tapped to promote creative ideas in service providers. In
particular, the results of our study suggest that it might be fruitful for professional service organizations
and their management to explore ways to increase the likelihood of customer participation in the
service process, particularly in sharing their ideas. Efforts could also be taken to encourage service
providers to foster customers’ participation by developing trusting relations with them—for example,
management could increase service providers’ awareness of the potential benefits of customer trust for
creativity.
While these primary effects are important, the interaction effect we did not obtain is also interesting.
Surprisingly, the interaction between customer trust and customer input was not significant, suggesting
that customer trust did not moderate the effect of customer input on creativity. Therefore, this result
signifies that although trust in a service employee may provide a friendly and relaxed work
environment conducive to creativity, it did not change the relation between customer input and
employee creative performance. One possible explanation for the lack of a significant interaction may
be that a mutually trusting relationship may be required in order to moderate the effect of input on
creativity. This study examined only the customer’s trust in the employee, which may determine the
degree to which input is provided, but an employee’s trust in the customer may be essential for this
input to impact creativity. Thus, additional research may be needed to examine the effect of service
providers’ trust in their customers on the input–creativity relation.
Another interesting result from our research concerns the extent to which customers, as part of the
social context, could be linked to creativity. We found that while customer trust was not associated with
organization-related employee creativity, customer input made a significant contribution to
service-related as well as organization-related creativity. Consistent with previous research (Madjar,
DOI: 10.1002/job
2008), this finding may indicate that the more general environment is associated with different
customer factors than is the immediate social context for creativity. Specifically, while trusting
customers, present at the time the service is performed, may enhance the creativity of such service, their
trust is not significantly associated with creative performance in other tasks. In comparison, our result
for customer input demonstrates that clients, as outsiders to the service establishment, may be powerful
contributors of input for creative ideas in multiple and diverse aspects of a stylist’s job. With this
knowledge in hand, supervisors can manage the social environments more appropriately for the type of
creativity that is desired.
One of the strengths of this study was the availability of multiple sources of creativity ratings
(supervisors and customers) and the ratings of two separate types of creativity: service-related and
organization-related. For most of the field research conducted so far in organizations, when no other
objective measures existed, supervisors were asked to subjectively rate the creative performance of
employees (e.g., Madjar et al., 2002; Zhou & George, 2001). In this respect, supervisor ratings are now
the widely accepted and most commonly used method for measuring creative performance in field studies
(Shalley et al., 2004). However, this presents researchers with challenges. For example, researchers have
called for subjective evaluations of the same aspect of creativity from multiple judges in order to assess
inter-rater reliability in work settings (Shalley et al., 2004). Unfortunately, inter-rater reliability cannot be
assessed, as all studies so far have used only one supervisor to rate creative performance (e.g., Madjar
et al., 2002; Zhou & George, 2001). Our goal was to compare and contrast the different judges and to
examine customers’ ability to evaluate creativity in the service industry. The reasonably high correlation
between the judgments of supervisors and customers suggest that, although considered an ambiguous
concept, there is a high level of consensus in the rating of creativity from different sources (Amabile,
1996). This is an important finding for both research and practice in the area of creativity for two reasons.
First, comparison of creativity judgments from multiple sources may give us some additional insights into
the validity of the single supervisor ratings frequently used and may help remedy a major challenge to the
measurement of creativity in the workplace. The results of our study do support the validity of the
consensual assessment technique for measuring creativity and validate the subjective supervisor
judgment of creativity, used in most of the field research in this area. Second, the findings of high
inter-rater reliability also provide researchers with an alternative source to consider for assessing creative
performance in service settings—customer ratings—and may suggest that evaluations of creativity from
other sources may be desired or even more relevant. It is good news for managers in the service industry
that customers can make reliable and valid creativity evaluations of a service. This affords them a
practical option because, while the intangibility of the service product means that there are often no
objective measures of service quality, customers’ perceptions, and assessments are essential for the
success of the business (Bowen & Ford, 2002; Bowen & Schneider, 1988).
Results of our study have some clear implications for the management of creativity in the service
industry. To begin, they are consistent with earlier research (Madjar et al., 2002; Zhou & George, 2001),
suggesting that different individuals inside or outside the organization could influence individuals’
creative performance at work. More importantly, however, our study was the first to highlight the
potential contributions of customers to the social context impacting creativity in service organizations.
In particular, it may be possible to have employees engage in creative efforts by encouraging the
development of trusting and sharing relationships with customers, who provide valuable input. The
challenge for managers in service organizations is to capitalize on this by helping their employees to
manage the interactions with customers in a way that engenders trust. Researchers may support these
initiatives by exploring the conditions under which trust-filled customer-service provider relationships
will flourish.
In terms of customer input, our results contribute to a growing stream of research that regards
customers not exclusively as outsiders, but as part-time members of the service organization (Kelley,
DOI: 10.1002/job
Donnelly, & Skinner, 1990). Therefore, organizations may exploit the value of customers for creativity.
First, as interactions with customers involve considerable sharing and exchange of information,
organizations may focus employees’ efforts on managing and building relationships with customers in
order to solicit more input for creativity. Second, organizations may want to include customers as
potential partners for service creativity (Bettencourt, 1997) by encouraging the customers to articulate
expectations, problems, and input. Inviting such feedback may help customers to perform their roles as
‘‘co-producers’’ in the service experience more effectively (Kelley et al., 1990), thereby enhancing the
creativity of the service providers.
As far as customers’ creativity evaluations of the service product is concerned, the strong agreement
among customers and the convergent validity with supervisor evaluations are clear indications that
customers are reliable evaluators of service-related creativity. The implication is that organizations
would be well-served by not only respecting, but actively seeking opinions from the customer regarding
their employees’ creative performance.
Our study does have a few limitations that should be considered. First, our sample included
employees from hair salons only, where constant interaction with customers is a major component of
the social context. It is not yet clear whether our results generalize to other types of organizations, in
which the nature of the customer-service provider relationship is different or where the contact with the
customer is more sporadic (Sutton & Kelley, 1997). Future research might attempt to test the ideas
developed in this study across different samples and settings. Second, we argued throughout that trust
and creative input from customers influence creativity. Yet this study was not an experiment, and such
causal inferences are not technically justified. Even though our arguments were guided by several
conceptual frameworks, it is possible that creative employees simply received more input and
established more trusting relationships with their customers. Third, in some of our analyses, both trust
and creativity ratings came from the same source—customers. While all measures were taken to avoid
common method problems—we used different scales for measuring the two variables (Podsakoff et al.,
2003); factor analyses showed that the items clearly loaded on two separate factors and the results in the
analyses with these variables are very compatible with the results with supervisor ratings as a dependent
variable—common method bias may still play a small role. Fourth, our trust in the stylist measure was
obtained at the individual (customer) level of analysis, while customer input for creativity was
measured at the stylist’ level of analysis and referred to input from customers in general, not from the
particular customers in the study who have a certain level of trust in the relationship. Establishing
dyadic relationships may be useful in the future, especially for the further investigation of the
interaction between customer trust and input.
Finally, our findings suggest various other avenues for future research. First, we need to examine
whether the subject of customer input is relevant to its impact on creativity. For instance, would a
customer’s sharing of information on hairstyling techniques trigger a different creative response from a
stylist than information on, say, the law of physics? Along similar lines, we focused our attention on
how input from customers helps the service employee to generate a new idea; however, it may be that
the customers and employees together could produce even more creative outcomes or that a mutual
exchange of information could explain more variance in creativity than simply input given by
customers. Thus, some research is warranted regarding the impact of information exchange in both
directions on creativity in the service industry. Given that customer-related factors are associated with
employee creativity, future research might also explore customer characteristics that may detract from
employees engaging in creative efforts.
On the trust front, we know from the literature that trust develops over time, and not all encounters
with customers allow employees adequate time to develop such a relationship. Hence, we suggest that
future researchers might examine ways to earn customer trust over shorter encounters. Consistent with
most of the marketing and service industry literature, we examined customer trust in their service
DOI: 10.1002/job
employees, but we have not developed a way to measure the employees’ perceptions of such trust. As
sometimes perceptions are more important than reality (in this case, the level of actual trust by the
customer), it is imperative that future investigations look at trust from this unique perspective and its
influence on creativity. We also do not know much about other customer-oriented characteristics or
factors that may be related to creativity.
Although our study has some limitations, its strengths make key contributions to the research in
several ways. First, we examine creativity in the service industry, which has received limited attention
despite the recognition that the creativity of products and services plays a significant role in the success
of service firms (Sethi et al., 2001)—particularly in the hair care market due to increased competition
(Davis, 1992). Second, we differentiate service-related and organization-related creativity and find
differences in the influences of the social context for the two types. Third, given the service context, we
examine the impact of trust and input from a different source not yet considered in the management of
creativity—that is, customers—and their ability to serve as reliable evaluators of creative
performance. Finally, multiple sources of data were gathered from customers, stylists, and supervisors
affording us a look at creativity from more than one viewpoint while at the same time limiting some
concerns of common method variance.
To conclude, this study provides a good initial understanding of customers’ role in stimulating
creativity in the service sector. More specifically, the results demonstrate that customers’ trust in their
service providers and motivation to offer input for creativity are associated with higher employee
creative performance. Our analyses further suggest that customers can make reliable judgments of
employees’ creativity and show that, depending on the type of creativity that is desired, some aspects of
the social context may be more important than others.
Author biographies
Nora Madjar is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Connecticut. She received
her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her current research focuses on the
social and contextual influences on individual and team creativity at work.
Rowena Ortiz-Walters is an Assistant Professor of Management at Quinnipiac University where she
teaches both management and entrepreneurship courses. Her research interests include creativity,
mentoring, entrepreneurship, diversity, and teams. She received her Ph.D. from the University of
Connecticut.
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DOI: 10.1002/job

Customers As Contributors and Reliable Evaluators of Creativity in The Service Industry

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Journal of Organizational Behavior

J. Organiz. Behav. 29, 949–966 (2008)

Customers as contributors and

Received 28 June 2006

Creativity and the social context in the service sector

Customer trust and employee creativity

Customer input and creativity

Customer trust and input for creativity

Sample and procedures

Analyses and Results

Relations among the measures

Table 1. Correlations, means, and standard deviations

1. Gender 0.08 0.27 —

ratings of service-related creativity, and supervisor ratings of organization-related creativity).

Customer input, trust, and creativity

Table 2. Results of hierarchical linear regression analysis

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