Servitized manufacturers can leverage close relationships with external providers of product-related services to mobilize value creation and improve the responsiveness of their offerings to customer needs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic link between the relational embeddedness of external service providers, as arising from the key dimension of dependence, and firm performance.,The study evaluates financial statement data pertaining to 190 dyadic relationships of servitized manufacturers with service providers operating in downstream channels and accounting for more than 10 per cent of their revenue.,The results indicate that service providers’ dependence has an inverted U-shaped relationship with manufacturers’ return-on-assets (ROA), via non-linear effects on return-on-sales and asset turnover. The results therefore suggest that the observed U-shaped relationship for ROA is driven by diminishing returns of dependence in terms of both differentiation ability and operational efficiency.,Future research could examine other dimensions of embeddedness, as well as contingency factors that may influence the embeddedness–performance relationship.,The study conclusions suggest that managers of servitized firms should foster the embeddedness of external service providers, but they should also be careful to maintain an adequate level of dependence to maximize benefits and minimize liabilities.,The study adds to the limited research delving into inter-firm relationships between servitized manufacturers and external service providers. It empirically demonstrates the economic effects of service providers’ dependence-based embeddedness, challenging the general assumption about a monotonic positive effect of relational embeddedness.

中文翻译：

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服务提供商与公司绩效：调查依赖关系的非线性影响

专门服务的制造商可以利用与产品相关服务的外部提供商的紧密关系来动员价值创造并提高其产品对客户需求的响应速度。本文的目的是调查外部服务提供商的关系嵌入性（取决于依赖的关键维度）与公司绩效之间的经济联系。该研究评估了与服务化制造商与服务的190种二元关系有关的财务报表数据供应商在下游渠道运营，占其收入的10％以上。结果表明，服务提供商的依赖性通过非线性效应与制造商的资产回报率（ROA）呈倒U型关系。销售回报率和资产周转率。因此，结果表明，观察到的ROA的U形关系是由分化能力和运营效率方面的依赖回报递减驱动的。未来的研究可以检查嵌入的其他方面以及可能影响嵌入的偶然性因素–绩效关系。研究结论表明，服务公司的管理者应增强外部服务提供者的嵌入性，但他们也应谨慎保持适当的依赖水平，以使收益最大化和负债最小化。深入研究服务的制造商与外部服务提供商之间的公司间关系。它从经验上证明了服务提供商基于依赖的嵌入性的经济影响，