Health Care Customer Value Co-Creation Practice Styles

Janet R. McColl-Kennedy, University of Queensland
Stephen L. Vargo, University of Hawai’i
Tracey Dagger, Monash University
Jillian C. Sweeney, University of Western Australia
Yasmin van Kasteren, University of Queensland

This article explores in-depth what health care customers actually do when they co-create value. Combining previously published research with data collected from depth interviews, field observation and focus groups, the authors identify distinct styles of health care customer value co-creation practice. Importantly, we show how customers can contribute to their own value creation through their own (self) activities in managing their health care. Building on past work in service-dominant (S-D) logic, Consumer Culture Theory and social practice theory, we identify “roles”, “activities” and “interactions” that underlie customer co-creation of value in health care. We uncover five groupings of customer value co-creation practices yielding a typology of practice styles and link these to quality of life. The practice styles are: “Team Management”, “Insular Controlling”, “Partnering”, “Pragmatic Adapting” and “Passive Compliance”. Two in particular, “Team Management” and “Partnering”, should be encouraged by managers as they tend to be associated with higher quality of life. The authors provide a health care Customer Value Co-creation Practice Styles (CVCPS) typology. The usefulness of the typology is demonstrated by showing links to quality of life and its potential application to other health care settings.

 

McColl-Kennedy, J.R., Vargo, S.L., Dagger, T.S., Sweeney, J. C., & van Kasteren, Y. (2012). Health care customer value co-creation practice styles, Journal of Service Research, 15(4), 370-389