When Does (Mis)Fit in Customer Orientation Matter for Frontline Employees’ Job Satisfaction and Performance?

Abstract

The role of coworkers’ customer orientation (CO) in influencing an employee's CO has received sparse attention in the literature. This research serves two purposes. First, the study draws on person–group fit theory to develop and test a model of a frontline employee's CO relative to that of his or her coworkers as well as the effects of CO (mis)fit on job satisfaction and service performance through coworker relationship quality. Second, the authors propose three work-group characteristics—group size, service climate strength, and leader‒member exchange differentiation—that they expect to mitigate the (negative) positive effect of employee‒coworker CO (mis)fit on coworker relationship quality. Data collected in a multirespondent (i.e., frontline employees and supervisors) longitudinal research design indicate that as group size increases, service climate becomes stronger, and group leaders develop different exchange relationships with employees, the inherently (negative) positive role of employee–coworker CO (mis)fit in influencing coworker relationship quality diminishes. Furthermore, coworker relationship quality fully mediates the associations of employee–coworker CO (mis)fit with job satisfaction and service performance. The authors close with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the boundary conditions of CO (mis)fit.

Innovation at the Service Encounter in Knowledge Intensive Business Services: Antecedents and Boundary Conditions

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

“…2 We included a number of potentially important factors as control variables both at the firm level and employee level: organizational formalization, measured with the scale of Jansen, Van Den Bosch and Volberda (2006), because it limits employee autonomy and thus may influence the employee CO-performance relationship; employee job resources, captured by the quality of internal cooperation, because in addition to CO as a crucial job resource for employees (Zablah et al, 2012), the quality of contact to and collaboration with internal partners is an important job resource, which may affect both employee CO and performance (Plouffe et al, 2016); employee job demand, measured with an item based on Dwyer and Ganster (1991), because the demandingness of work-related activities may both directly affect employee CO and performance and influence the employee CO-performance relationship (Zablah et al, 2012); employee job stress, measured as the number of sick days (e.g. Dwyer and Ganster, 1991), because stress may negatively affect both employee CO and performance (Zablah et al, 2012); employee job engagement, measured with an item based on Rich, Lepine and Crawford (2010), because this positive, work-related affective-motivational state of mind may increase 542 D. Herhausen, L. M. De Luca and M. Weibel both employee CO and performance (Zablah et al, 2012); and co-worker CO because the CO of other employees may increase employee performance (Menguc et al, 2016). In addition, we control for number of employees, turnover in the previous year, and employee gender, age, education and tenure.…”

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Is it better to be both nice and nasty? Investigating the co-occurrence of sales manager aggressiveness and caring

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