The Interplay Between Employee and Firm Customer Orientation: Substitution Effect and the Contingency Role of Performance‐Related Rewards

Abstract

This paper identifies and explains a potential tension between a firm's emphasis on customer orientation (CO) and the extent to which employees value CO as a success factor for individual performance. Based on self‐determination theory and CO implementation research, the authors propose that firm CO may represent both autonomous and controlled motivations for CO, but that employees’ CO is more strongly linked to individual performance when employees experience solely autonomous motivation. Hence, the authors expect a substitution effect whereby the link between employees’ CO and their performance is weaker when firm CO is high. Furthermore, the authors examine a boundary condition for the previous hypothesis and propose that performance‐contingent rewards have a positive effect on the internalization of the extrinsic motivation stemming from firm CO. Two multilevel studies with 979 employees and 201 top management team members from 132 firms support these hypotheses. Against previous research, these findings offer a new perspective on the effectiveness of CO initiatives, propose employees’ motivational states as the theoretical explanation for the heterogeneity in the link between employee CO and performance, and reappraise the role of performance‐contingent rewards in CO research. Managerial implications for the effective implementation of customer‐oriented initiatives within firms are provided.

The Customer Orientation of Salesperson for Performance in Korean Market Case: A Relationship between Customer Orientation and Adaptive Selling

“…For the consequences of customer orientation, a number of scholars agree that customer orientation enhances the quality of the relationship between the seller and the buyer, but the relationship between customer orientation and sales performance show various results. The results of these studies are as follows: First, a positive causal relationship between the two variables [26,30,34,[40][41][42], second, there are various studies reporting a non-significant relationship between variables [26,43], and finally the study that there is a negative causality [34]. Saxe and Weitz's study [34] shows that a high relation-oriented group forms a positive relationship with performance and a low relation-oriented group forms a negative relationship.…”

Making the Customer Orientation of Salespeople Unsustainable—The Moderating Effect of Emotional Exhaustion

“…We found not only functional customer orientation but also rational customer orientation contributes to positive job outcomes, such as adaptive selling behaviors. Furthermore, our research explains why higher customer orientation leads to higher job performance [11,18], partly because higher customer orientation increases adaptive selling behaviors when salespeople interact with customers as shown in this paper.…”

“…Functional customer orientation will increase salespeople's autonomous service motivation and result in more adaptive selling behaviors. Compared to company customer orientation, which contains more controlled motivation, employee customer orientation includes more autonomous motivation [11]. When salespeople have high functional customer orientation, they are more willing to help customers solve their problems and more likely to adopt adaptive selling behaviors, compared with low functional customer orientation.…”

“…Maintaining a close relationship with customers is very important for salespeople, especially in China, because Chinese individuals' relationships (i.e., guanxi) have instrumental attributes, and products in China are usually sold on the basis of friendship [9]. Additionally, previous studies found that salespeople's customer orientation has mixed effects on performance outcomes [10,11], and functional (vs. relational) customer orientation produces a different effect on the creativity of salespeople [8]. Therefore, we specifically classify customer orientation into functional customer orientation and relational customer orientation in order to locate its different influences.…”

Customer Orientation of B2B Firms in Emerging Markets: Evidence from Russia

“…The first direction tries to identify CO of an individual salesmen even before the concept has been widely tested at the firm-level [Saxe, Weitz, 1982]. For B2B firms, CO on employee level has substantial importance as there are fewer customers and building strong relationships is vital part of business [Singh, Koshy, 2011;Farias, Torres, Cortez, 2017;Babu, 2018;Herhausen, De Luca, Weibel, 2018;Lussier, Hall, 2018].…”