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Top1. Introduction
The recent upsurge in service management activities in firms has also attracted the investigative interests of research scholars. Issues in service activities have been researched and solved through the lens of service perception. Several approaches to services have been discussed to promote the effectiveness of businesses. Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons (2003) asserted services were intangible experiences provided to customers acting as co-producers. Organizations have shifted their operations from manufacturing to providing services. However, Lovelock and Wirzt (2007) proposed 8Ps (product, pricing, position, promotion, people, process, physical environment, and productivity) in their strategies on marketing in engaging services to reach customers by changing how firms marketed their services to customers. In addition, the value co-creation approach also led the way to how firms provided their services by taking customers’ experience into consideration (Prahalad, 2004). The Service Dominant Logic (SDL) proposed by Vargo and Lush (2004) has notably revealed new directions in service management, where service values have been noted as being the most important in the service process, in which collaboration between firms and customers is crucial from the viewpoint of the value-in-use concept.
The new concept of a service mediator has been proposed in the IT service business based on SDL to close the gaps between collaborations between providers and users (Doan, Shirahada, & Kosaka, 2013). The mediator supports co-creation between service providers and users by matching services, sharing information, and promoting collaborations. The effectiveness of this mediator in the IT service business has been verified through successful business outcomes such as those accomplished by Hitachi TWX-21 and CookPad. However, it is not only IT services that need to promote value co-creation, but other business fields also need to enhance value co-creation. The SDL mediator model is expected to convey high-value co-creation to other areas of service exchanges. Human Relation Management (HRM) is required for an innovative model like that in the concept of the SDL mediator to solve problems and deal with numerous issues in collaborations between employers and employees.
This paper proposes a new service mediator model based on SDL and service fields, which offers an alternative reason for enhancing service values in HRM. The SDL mediator organizes and manages service fields in which providers and receivers feel comfortable, trustworthy, and convenient, which enables them to share their competencies to co-create values. Prior research on HRM has excessively stressed the relational aspect of HRM. However, the mechanism for boosting the relationships of value co-creation is an approach that truly contributes to HRM. We investigated the relationship between employers and employees and how they collaborated. The mediating role of HRM is discussed to verify the significance of the mediator in HRM. The case study of a municipal hospital in Ishikawa, Japan, is presented to demonstrate the potential of the SDL mediator in HRM to achieve success in organizations.