Senior Leadership: An Annotated Bibliography of Research Supported by the Army Research Institute.

Employee customer orientation in manufacturing organizations: Joint influences of customer proximity and the senior leadership team.

“…Thus the customer-related attitudes of a business facility's senior managers may influence the managerial practices they choose to implement in the facility. Similarly, Zaccaro (1996) and Zaccaro and Banks (2001) noted that senior leaders have both direction-setting and operational management responsibilities in organizations and play a significant role in the creation, translation, and implementation of the organization's strategies. We argue that customer-oriented senior leaders are in a good position to promote customer orientation among employees in different functional roles by setting a compelling vision to help employees appreciate the importance of customer satisfaction (Bass, 1985), establishing organizational or departmental objectives that emphasize developing ECO (Subramony, Beehr, & Johnson, 2004), providing resources and technology to enable employees to better understand customer needs (Schneider, White, & Paul, 1998), and championing human resources management (HRM) practices that lead to the selection, development, recognition, and retention of employees with customer-related competencies and attitudes (Rogg, Schmidt, Shull, & Schmitt, 2001).…”