How Social Interactions Demotivate Customer Participation in Creativity Tasks: From the Perspective of Social Exclusion Theory

The performance of customer participation in service innovation depends on the effective interactions among customers, customer communities and firms. It is an indisputable fact that customers' collaboration in service innovation is good for the value co-creation process (e.g. closer fit to consumer needs, better differentiation). However, it is still quite possible that social exclusion phenomenon, which happens frequently in the social co-creation environment, could seriously handicap customer participation. In this paper, we further differentiate two kinds of social exclusion, being actively rejected or being passively ignored. Two experiments investigated the effects of social exclusion on intrinsic motivation of a creative task, and we found that only the negative social experience of being ignored interfered with people's ability to experience intrinsic motivation, whereas being socially accepted or rejected would not. The implications and limitations of our research were discussed.