Empirical Study on the Impact of User Participation on Service Value

As enterprise systems (ES) becomes increasingly pervasive and commoditized in organizations, its service value emerges as a critical issue. Drawing on the customer value theory, this paper studies the relationship between user participation and service value of enterprise systems in the stage of enterprise system improvement. A survey of 220 employees in a large-scale industrial enterprise was taken to investigate the relationship between them. User participation has direct positive impacts on service value in the process of system improvement. Furthermore, information service quality and non-monetary sacrifice serve as mediating variables of the relationship between user participation in system improvement and service value even after controlling for individual variables such as users’ age, education, and IT-related education. This paper contributes to the theory on whether user participation matters in the process of enterprise system improvement. The findings can also encourage managerial practitioners to exploit user participation in organizations, in order to enhance service value of enterprise system.