Actor ecosystem readiness: understanding the nature and role of human abilities and motivation in a service ecosystem

Fueled by technological advances, service delivery today is increasingly realized among multiple actors beyond dyadic service encounters. Customers, for example, often collaborate with peers, service employees, platform providers, or other actors in a service ecosystem to realize desired outcomes. Yet such multi-actor settings pose greater demands for both customers and employees given added connectivity, changing roles, and responsibilities. Advancing prior dyadic readiness conceptualizations, this article lays the theoretical ground for an ecosystem-oriented understanding of readiness, which we refer to as actor ecosystem readiness (AER). Grounded in a six-stage systematic synthesis of literature from different disciplines, our AER concept unpacks the cognitive, emotional, interactional, and motivational conditions that enable a customer or an employee to navigate a service ecosystem effectively. Building on human capital resource literature, we propose a multilevel framework around five sets of propositions that theorize AER’s nomological interdependencies across ecosystem levels. In articulating the process of how AER results in higher-level ecosystem outcomes, we demonstrate how AER serves as a microfoundation of service ecosystem effectiveness. By bridging this micro–macro divide, our AER concept and framework advance multilevel theory on human readiness and critically refine the service ecosystem concept itself while providing managerial guidance and an extensive future research agenda.