This study aims to examine how a customer’s perception of a firm’s operant resources (representational, cultural and social resources) affects the service value in a highly interaction service context. An empirical analysis was conducted on 263 patients in health care service in Vietnam. | TẠP CHÍ PHÁT TRIỂN KH & CN, TẬP 19, SỐ Q1 - 2016 Firm’s operant resources and service value - A customer perspective in health care service Pham Ngoc Thuy Nguyen Tran Cam Linh Nguyen Tien Dung Pham Tien Minh University of Technology, VNU HCM - Email: pnthuy@ (Manuscript Received on May 20th, 2015; Manuscript Revised on August 3rd, 2015) ABSTRACT This study aims to examine how a customer’s perception of a firm’s operant resources (representational, cultural and social resources) affects the service value in a highly interaction service context. An empirical analysis was conducted on 263 patients in health care service in Vietnam. The results show that firm’s operant resources as viewed by customers have a significant impact on perceived service value. Of which, the cultural resource has the strongest weight on customer perceived value. Discussions and managerial implications have been presented accordingly. Keyword: firm’s operant resources, service value, word-of-mouth, health care services. 1. INTRODUCTION The term of value is essential for any firms [52] but it is not consistently understood by researchers because of its overuse in variety of fields such as finance, economics, management, information systems, ethics, marketing [36]. Albeit different views, most scholars in service marketing agree that service value is formed by the perception of customers when experiencing any kinds of service [36; 33]. Customers’ service experience might be associated with both benefits that they enjoy after using a service and what they have during the service process [33]. In service dominant logic view (SDL), firms and customers are considered as value co- creators [48] and both have to integrate their resources including operand and operant ones, to create value for customers. Based on the resource-advantage theory [40], firms are required to focus on the intangible, dynamic, operant resources to enhance firm’s competitive advantage and .
