The influence of organizational culture and internal politics on new service design and introduction

The design of new services is a fundamental element of a firm’s growth strategy but, despite some recent work, our knowledge of the new service design process remains weak. This paper examines the impact of service culture and internal politics on the design, introduction success and rejection of new service design proposals. The extant literature is reviewed, a conceptual framework is developed and several longitudinal case examples are discussed. The results indicate that existing service culture can have a significant impact on modifying the new service design proposal making implementation success and high customer satisfaction levels more difficult to achieve. Several propositions for future research are presented.