Personality, Personal Values,
and Consumer Participation
in Self-Production: The Case
of Home Meal Preparation
Mai Thi Xuan Huynh
Nha Trang University
Svein Ottar Olsen
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
ABSTRACT
This study investigates the simultaneous influence of personality and personal values on attitude
toward self-production, and how self-production attitude influences use of time and depth of
self-production behavior in home meal preparation. The results show that self-control and
agreeableness personality traits positively influence attitude toward self-production, while the
resultant self-enhancement value dimension has a negative effect. Moreover, self-control negatively
moderates the influence of resultant self-enhancement on self-production attitude. Attitude toward
self-production has positive influences on both dimensions of self-production behavior, with a
stronger effect on the depth dimension than on the time use dimension. The results support the
proposed hierarchical model that personality and personal values relate to more specific
self-production attitude and behavior in a food preparation context. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The prevailing view in consumer research conceives
consumers as not just passive recipients, but active
participants in the value creation process (Lusch &
Vargo, 2006; Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Different terms
or facets have been used to examine phenomena of
consumer participation in value creation, such as self-
service (Curran, Meuter, & Surprenant, 2003; Dab-
holkar & Bagozzi, 2002), do-it-yourself (Williams, 2008;
Wolf & McQuitty, 2011), prosumption (Witell, Kris-
tensson, Gustafsson, & L¨ ofgren, 2011; Xie, Bagozzi,
& Troye, 2008), coproduction (Etgar, 2008; Lusch &
Vargo, 2006), and value cocreation (Healy & McDon-
agh, 2013; Yi & Gong, 2013). This study investigates
“self-production” as a specific type of consumer partic-
ipation used by Troye and Supphellen (2012), which
refers to the consumer’s involvement in the production
of goods or services in collaboration with commercial
providers indirectly via their input products (e.g., home
maintenance, home meal preparation, or cloth making).
It is important to understand why and how consumers
participate in producing products or services in order
to involve them properly in the production process as
a way to gain competitive advantage (Lusch, Vargo, &
O’Brien, 2007).
Personality and personal values are two important
domains of individual difference that play significant
roles in explaining and understanding consumer
attitude and behavior (e.g., Mulyanegara & Tsarenko,
2009; Xie, Bagozzi, & Troye, 2008). Studies suggest
that as personality and personal values represent
distinct yet complementary variables, combining them
in one model may increase their predictive accuracy
and reveal their relative contribution in explaining
other variables (Parks & Guay, 2009; Volk, Th¨ oni, &
Ruigrok, 2011). Thus, there have been a few recent
empirical attempts to investigate the combined in-
fluence of personality traits and values in predicting
different outcomes, such as political choice (Caprara,
Schwartz, Capanna, Vecchione, & Barbarelli, 2006),
fashion brand preferences (Mulyanegara & Tsarenko,
2009), medical specialty choice (Taber, Hartung, &
Borges, 2011), and academic performance (Parks &
Guay, 2012). In the area of consumer participation
research, some studies have confirmed the role of either
personality (Dabholkar & Bagozzi, 2002; Fuller, Mat-
zler, & Hoppe, 2008) or personal values (Xie, Bagozzi,
& Troye, 2008) in predicting consumer participation
phenomena. However, there is no evidence of any study
Psychology & Marketing, Vol. 32(7): 709–724 (July 2015)
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mar
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20812
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