A Model of Sustainable Distributed Service Delivery in Organizations With Compassion-Based Missions

Client Coproduction and Compassion-Based Services

The services literature raises the potential for clients to participate in the generation of the service (e.g., Auh, Bell, McLeod, & Shih, 2007; Bendapudi & Leone, 2003; Huffman & Skaggs, 2010; Skaggs & Droege, 2004; Skaggs & Huffman, 2003). For most manufacturing firms, the product is produced entirely by the firm. In services, however, clients can become a part of the service generation process and can actively engage in the creation of the service they consume by supplying both information and physical effort (Bendapudi & Leone, 2003). That is, service coproduction can be utilized—clients are involved in creating and delivering the service themselves. This aspect of service offerings suggests that service firms need to consider the client in the structuring of how service is provided, something that manufacturing firms must do to a far lesser degree (e.g., Skaggs & Galli-Debicella, 2012). It also suggests greater latitude of choice in the design of the service delivery process for service firms, in that the level of client participation in service generation can be altered by the organization so as to help it fulfill its mission. Moreover, use of clients in service generation allows these firms to shift production costs between themselves and the “buyers of the service,” an option less available to manufacturing firms (Skaggs & Huffman, 2003).

This coproduction aspect of services also has consequences for a service firm’s ability to seal-off its operations from environmental disturbances. The spaciotemporal separation that exists between production and consumption for most manufacturing firms allows them to buffer their technical core from external disturbances in order to rationalize and economize methods of production (Thompson, 1967). For service firms, such a separation may not be possible. Since many services cannot be inventoried and sold at a later date, buyers (clients) and providers must interact at the service generation level in order for the service to be rendered (Skaggs & Huffman, 2003). Thus, the ability of a service firm to buffer its technical core from environmental disturbances is greatly diminished. As a result, the ability to adapt to customer-induced disturbances becomes a key issue for the effectiveness of service output (e.g., Tansik, 1990). Indeed, research has shown that service organizations that adapt their service generation processes and human resources to the level of customer-induced variability achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness (Skaggs & Huffman, 2003; Skaggs & Youndt, 2004). In sum, client coproduction can have impacts on the cost and quality of the offerings of service organizations.

We believe firms with compassion-based service missions tend to have distinct characteristics that involve the use of client coproduction. As a case in point, we introduce Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). AA was created in 1935 and is currently the most frequently used program for facilitating recovery from substance abuse. It is a nonprofit organization that originated as a self-help group to assist people in maintaining sobriety and helping them during alcohol recovery. Recently, membership worldwide was estimated to be over two million in 150 countries (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 2006). AA is perhaps the most prominent illustration of increasing interest in self-help groups that represent alternatives to professional health care treatment and aftercare (Humphreys, 2004; Tonigan, Toscova, & Miller, 1996). These groups are both free and voluntary and bring people together with overlapping experiences to work with and support one another in addressing a common problem (Groh, Jason, & Keys, 2008; Humphreys, 2004). Besides AA, there are a number of other organizations with compassion-based missions that also attempt to utilize past and present clients. For example, First Steps is a compassion-based program that helps children with special needs. A large component of First Steps centers on parent support groups, where member parents help others with the issues and challenges of raising a special needs child. Other similarly styled groups include Autism Speaks (the leading autism science and advocacy organization) and the Alzheimer’s Association (the leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer’s care, support, and research).

The first area where client coproduction can affect compassion-based organizations is on the cost side of service generation. Groups like AA tend to place less emphasis on profit relative to caring for persons in need. This increased emphasis on caring for clients relative to financial outcomes makes cost-effectiveness of utmost importance. In many cases such organizations are nonprofit enterprises with scarce resources (Kahn, 2005) and expansive missions (e.g., AA’s efforts to support persons struggling with alcohol addiction on a wide-spread basis; Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 2006). Consequently, to establish a sustainable service that does not dissolve because of a firm’s inability to stay solvent in the face of financial pressures, distinct cost-effective service strategies are needed. As a result, these organizations can use the efforts of current and former clients to reduce the costs of providing the service.

Organizations with compassion-based missions also tend to address particularly acute levels of need and suffering of those that they serve (e.g., addiction, hunger, disease, which require significant insight and understanding for effective service to occur). The needs of clients whose personal difficulties cause deep-seated suffering that is resistant to sustainable solutions creates formidable challenges for service delivery. Frequently, strategies need to be adjusted to adapt to the needs of clients in the midst of the simultaneous generation and provision of service. For example, individuals who have experienced the insidious and powerful nature of alcohol addiction are more likely to possess the empathetic potential to serve persons struggling with addiction with understanding and care. Providing the support and assistance that is needed by members of AA can vary from person to person and situation to situation. Persons who have experience with the challenges involved and have a deep commitment to meeting the needs of others struggling with alcoholism can be a pivotal part of effectively producing and adjusting the service. Consequently, members of AA (who possess experience-based knowledge and the potential for empathetic support) can represent crucial cocreators and coproviders of service for one another.

Finally, for potential clients to receive the service, they must interact with the organization’s service generation process. Since some who are suffering may not actively seek help (for reasons of embarrassment, denial, incapacitation, etc.), the organization’s service generation must extend beyond the confines of a physical building so that these individuals can be helped. Enlisting clients of the organization is one way to extend the service generation process to meet these needs. Indeed, sometimes service of clients might be best provided by other clients, especially when the needs being served are highly personal, such as when painful psychological and emotional issues are involved. Involving clients in service delivery can infuse the process with increased awareness of issues and challenges, knowledge of what the immediate needs are and how they might best be met, and empathy concerning how to serve with caring and compassion. In addition, this built-in empathy may serve to reduce the level of “burnout” that can occur among workers in high-need compassion-based organizations (e.g., Leon, Altholz, & Dziegielewski, 1999; Rager, 2005).

Overall, service firms possess distinct characteristics that often make involvement by clients in coproduction of service delivery useful. This is especially the case for organizations with compassion-based service missions since they are often resource constrained and/or nonprofit, and their clients have a distinct potential for serving one another with experience and empathy. And as stated previously, this built-in empathy also reduces the possibility of burnout, which can be prevalent among workers in compassion-based organizations (e.g., Leon et al., 1999). Consequently, organizations with a mission focused on compassion are likely to incorporate high levels of coproduction in an attempt to enhance their service outcomes.

Sustainable Distributed Service Delivery

Our model predicts that organizations that have a compassion-based mission will be more likely to incorporate client coproduction into their service delivery process. Furthermore, the relationship between a compassion-based service mission and the degree of client coproduction is moderated by client shared leadership (clients’ leadership of each other as part of the service process intended to alleviate suffering). Also, the relationship between client coproduction and cost savings and empathy-enhanced service delivery (together fostering sustainability of the service process) is moderated by the self-leadership of clients. That is, coproduction will yield more sustainable service to the extent that clients engage in self-leadership. In the following section, we address in more detail the moderating role of shared leadership in fostering sustainable service of firms with compassion-based missions.

Implications and Conclusions

The emerging literature on compassion in work contexts (e.g., Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006; Frost, 1999; Kanov et al., 2004) has set the stage for greater attention to organizations with compassion-based missions. Such organizations can include nongovernmental organizations, charitable organizations, nonprofits, and the like that are designed to alter how customers/clients function in different aspects of their lives so that such change can be brought about. Examples range from the Red Cross, to the Peace Corps, to the organization we have highlighted in the present article—Alcoholics Anonymous. One area where these organizations often differ from those typically studied by management scholars is in the location of production. Whereas in most firms production occurs internally, organizations with compassion-based missions stand to benefit when service generation takes place outside the organization’s boundary; indeed, in some cases the majority of service generation that can lead to the organization’s desired service objectives can be carried out by clients. Thus, the kind of empathy-driven emotional support that is frequently involved in compassion efforts (Carmeli, Brueller, & Dutton, 2009; Gersick, Bartunek, & Dutton, 2000) largely necessitates a different conception of how compassion is created in these organizations. In addition, organizations with compassion-based service missions face the particularly vexing problem that organizational success can be determined largely by the efforts of the people they are trying to serve. This means that if these organizations wish to achieve their compassion-based missions, they must use their clients in a way that will yield the desired results.

In this article we introduced a model specifying key relationships in creating sustainable distributed delivery of compassion-based services. In particular, we posit that a compassionate service mission focused on alleviation of suffering will increase the likelihood that coproduction by clients will be employed. The extent to which this coproduction takes place as a result of a compassion-based service mission will be moderated by the amount of shared leadership exercised by clients. Furthermore, the outcomes of the service resulting from this coproduction will be moderated by the self-leadership of clients. Clients’ use of self-leadership strategies to lead themselves during service delivery will foster cost savings and effective empathetic caring for persons being served. Finally, temporal feedback loops are included in the model indicating cycles of positive deviance contributing to the sustainability of the distributed service system.

There are several theoretical implications of our model. One implication involves the growth of organizations with compassion-based missions. Although most firms typically have to hire and directly pursue markets in order to grow, client-based coproduction creates a self-perpetuating growth process where the organization transforms clients into sources of service for new members. This sets up what we term a “positive growth pyramid,” where the growth of the organization is fueled by the channeled compassion of clients serving one another, resulting in a sustainable service process that is characterized by less cost to the organization (an important outcome for many resource constrained firms that place more emphasis on compassion relative to profit) and more empathetic service for the client. A second implication has to do with the very nature of organizational boundaries. Since key service delivery participants are located outside the boundaries of the firm, traditional explanations of structure and control based on an organization-centric view may not be applicable (e.g., Skaggs & Galli-Debicella, 2012). In these types of firms principal–agent relationships do not exist with service providers who are also clients but rather a highly organic interplay between these clients and the firm. Thus the use of coproduction means that control in organizations with compassion-based missions resides as much in the clients’ commitment to the mission than it does in any formal organizational design features.

Another implication pertains to the role of compassion-based organizations. Seeing as most of these firms have distributed service systems, with the actual service being provided outside the organization boundaries, the question becomes, “What do these firms do?” One major role we see for these organizations is as facilitator/distributor of knowledge. In distributed service, new methods and techniques of service delivery are being developed and experimented with at thousands of locations, and all outside the organization. Effective organizations with compassion-based missions will find ways to harness this dispersed knowledge and channel it to where it is needed. This could be done by creating a broad information system and/or by creating networks of client coproducers where information and ideas on service delivery and effectiveness are exchanged.

Furthermore, our model has important implications for the study and practice of management in general. It emphasizes the importance of organizations viewing clients as an extended part of the service firm. As discussed above, clients who have had similar experiences are in better position to provide the kind of empathetic caring service that is required for firms with compassion-based missions. However, empathy from common challenges is only one similarity that can allow clients to identify with one another. Experience and knowledge of a firm—its products, services, and use issues—are other sources of common identity. A key implication is that new management and leadership perspectives are needed that look beyond traditional organizational forms to include the client; specifically, those that allow for and support perpetually growing and evolving shared as well as self-leading and mutually supportive human networks of people connected by a commitment to a common identity. Looking ahead, further study is needed of contemporary challenges and opportunities contained in environmental changes such as the increasing presence of social media and continued advances in information technology and their implications for distributed service delivery and leadership.

All this implies that organizational forms and practices are entering a new age. Many of the traditional bounds of organizational design and management practice no longer apply, especially in the growing service industry. Of particular note for this article, for firms that adopt a compassion-based mission addressing suffering for which treatments and solutions are particularly illusive, recruiting and equipping clients with self-leadership capacities to serve themselves and one another through a shared leadership process can be a critical component for success. Ultimately, organizations that set out to do significant good for people in need may discover that those they service can become their greatest allies in sustaining the mission of the organization.