Marketing boundary spanners—especially customer service representatives—are notably susceptible to burnout. The authors define the burnout construct and develop hypotheses to examine if burnout acts as a partial mediator between role stressors and key behavioral and psychological job outcomes. Responses from 377 customer service representatives reveal that burnout levels are high relative to other burnout-prone occupations (e.g., police, nursing) and that burnout has consistent, significant, and dysfunctional effects on their behavioral and psychological outcomes. Moreover, burnout mediates the negative effects of role stressors on job outcomes, whereas the positive effects of role stressors are unmediated.

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The marketing literature affirms the value of a customer orientation to organizational performance, but it is relatively silent on the implementation of this orientation. This research reports the results of a paired-comparison ethnographic study of the dynamics of implementing a customer orientation in a major public school district. Changes at a progressing site are compared with those at a struggling site. The study provides answers to the question of how an organization adopts a customer orientation by refining understanding of the roles of leadership, interfunctional coordination, and the collection and dissemination of customer-focused data in the transformation process.

Previous research has provided strong evidence for the benefits of embracing a market orientation, an organizational focus highlighting the needs of customers, and the creation of customer value. This study extends this focus on the customer to the individual worker level. A construct, customer mind-set (CMS), is developed that reflects the extent to which an individual employee believes that understanding and satisfying customers, whether internal or external to the organization, is central to the proper execution of his or her job. In this exploratory study, the authors develop a parsimonious scale for measuring CMS. Relationships between CMS and significant organizational variables are examined to establish CMS’s validity and provide some tentative insights into its value to researchers and practitioners. The authors believe the CMS construct will allow for operational-level analysis of the extent to which a customer orientation is embraced throughout an organization, permitting managers to implement targeted improvement strategies.