RESEARCH NOTES AND
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TOM J. BROWN, JOHN C. MOWEN, D. TODD DONAVAN, and JANE W. LICATA* Prior research indicates that market orientation is associated with positive outcomes for firms. For service organizations, a market orientation is implemented largely through individual service workers. The authors investigate the mediational role of customer orientation in a hierarchical model of the influence of personality traits on self-rated and supervisorrated performance. The results support a partially mediated hierarchical model. Three basic personality traits (emotional stability, agreeability, and the need for activity) account for 39% of the variance in the customer orientation of employees. In turn, the customer orientation measure and conscientiousness account for 26% of the variance in self-rated performance. The customer orientation measure, along with the direct effects of conscientiousness and agreeability, account for 12% of the variance in manager ratings. The authors discuss the results and their implications for marketing researchers and managers.
The Customer Orientation of Service Workers: Personality Trait Effects on Selfand Supervisor Performance Ratings Marketers who espouse the marketing concept believe that organizations ultimately achieve success by satisfying customer needs (Desphande, Farley, and Webster 1993; Kotler 1997). As described by Day (1994), a growing body of literature indicates that the market orientation of the firm is positively associated with the superior performance of
that firm. For example, the market orientation of the firm is positively related to profitability (Narver and Slater 1990) as well as employee commitment and esprit de corps (Jaworski and Kohli 1993). For most types of service organizations, individual service workers are direct participants in implementing the marketing concept. Rust, Zahorik, and Keiningham (1996, p. 391) note that the "personal interaction component of services is often a primary determinant of the customer's overall satisfaction." In our research, we investigate what we believe is an important but heretofore underexamined trait of service employees—their degree of customer orientation, or disposition to meet customers' needs. Customer orientation is an individual-level construct that we believe is central to a service organization's ability to be market oriented. We have two goals in examining the construct. First, we seek to
*Toin J. Brown is Associate Professor of Marketing (e-mail;
[email protected]). and John C. Mowen is Noble Chair of Marketing Strategy (e-mail:
[email protected]). College of Business Administration, Oklahoma Stale University. D. Todd Donavan is Assistant Professor of Marketing. College of Business Administration, Kansas State University (e-mail:
[email protected]). Jane W. Licata is Associate Professor of Marketing. EJ. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University (e-mail:
[email protected]). The authors thank Robert Hurley, the JMR Kevin Tarr. and Cristy Morrison for their contributions to the project.
Journat itf Marketing Research Vol. XXXIX (FEBRUARY 2tX)2). 110-119
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Customer Orientation of Service Workers identify its basic personality trait determinants so that we can obtain an improved understanding of factors that lead some employees to be more customer oriented than others. Second, we investigate the effects of customer orientation and the more basic traits on overall service performance evaluations as judged by the service workers themselves and the workers' supervisors. CUSTOMER ORIENTATION Despite the apparent importance of employees' customer orientation to the implementation of the marketing concept in the market-driven company, research on the construct has been limited. The first attempt to directly measure customer orientation at the individual level was performed by Saxe and Weitz (1982). They developed a 24-item scale with two dimensions (i.e., 12 positively phrased customer orientation items and 12 negatively phrased selling orientation items) to measure the extent to which a salesperson seeks to increase long-term customer satisfaction. Although their research indicates that customer orientation is related to sales performance, neither Saxe and Weitz (1982) nor researchers conducting follow-up studies (i.e., Michaels and Day 1985; Tadepalli 1995) have investigated the possible determinants of customer orientation. In our research, we define customer orientation as an employee's tendency or predisposition to meet customer needs in an on-the-job context. Furthermore, we propose that customer orientation in a service setting is composed of two dimensions. The needs dimension represents employees' beliefs about their ability to satisfy customer needs and is based on Saxe and Weitz's (1982) conceptualization of customer orientation. The enjoyment dimension represents the degree to which interacting with and serving customers is inherently enjoyable for an employee. We believe that both components are necessary to fully understand a service worker's ability and motivation to serve customers by meeting their needs. Personality Trait Determinants and Performance Outcomes of Customer Orientation Several researchers have investigated employee personality and performance in various contexts. Spivey, Munson, and Locander (1979) find that an outgoing personality is predictive of sales success in retail sales. Hogan, Hogan, and Busch (1984) define service orientation as a combination of three basic personality traits (i.e., adjustment, sociability, and agreeableness) and find that these traits are predictive of supervisor service performance ratings. Day and Silverman (1989) find that work orientation and interpersonal orientation are predictive of client relations. More recently. Hurley (1998a) has found that extroversion and agreeableness are positively associated with workers' service performance ratings that are provided by managers. These investigations assess the direct relationship between "basic" personality traits (e.g., extroversion, agreeability) and manager evaluations, ratings by colleagues, or actual measures of performance. In a meta-analysis of this literature, Frei and McDaniel (1998) find that the personality traits agreeableness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness are predictive of supervisory ratings of job performance. Hurley (1998a) notes (and his results confirm) that measures of basic personality traits do not seem to account for a particularly sizable proportion of variance in ratings of
111 employee service performance. We believe that part of the difficulty stems from an omitted variable problem: None of the prior studies attempted to account for a construct that directly measures a service employee's disposition to be customer oriented. A Hierarchical Model of Customer Orientation In our work, we employ a hierarchical model of the effects of personality on behavior. Many theorists and researchers have argued that personality traits exist at various levels of abstraction (e.g., Allport 1961; Eysenck 1947; Lastovicka 1982; Mowen and Spears 1999; Paunonen 1998). Consistent with Mowen and Spears (1999), we employ a hierarchical model in which basic personality traits (i.e., introversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, agreeability, openness to experience, and need for activity) combine with a specific context for performance (i.e., the role of the service worker) to produce surface traits (i.e., customer orientation) or enduring dispositions, inclinations, or tendencies to behave within the context. It is important to include surface traits in the model, because basic personality traits may be too far removed from focal service behaviors to be able to predict service worker performance well. The surface trait (i.e., customer orientation) is closer in the personality hierarchy to the specific behaviors needed to achieve high performance and therefore should enhance the prediction of specific behaviors and performance ratings. Allport (1961) first used the term "surface trait" to describe summaries of surface behaviors (as opposed to specific focal behaviors). Working from this viewpoint, Mowen and Spears (1999) define a surface trait as an enduring disposition to behave within a specific situational context. They propose that the press of the situation, such as the role demands of a job as a server in a restaurant, exerts pressures to behave in specific ways. These situational pressures combine with more basic personality traits to create the surface traits.' Surface traits are contextual, because a given person's general disposition to perform behaviors may diverge in different aspects of life (e.g,, the service worker who is attuned to the needs of customers when at work yet is seemingly insensitive to the needs of family members when at home). They are classified as traits because they represent an enduring tendency to behave, albeit within particular situational contexts. These ideas are consistent with those of theorists who have noted that situations interact with dispositions to influence behavior (e.g.. Bowers 1973; Endler and Rosenstein 1997; Mischel 1968). Because our interest is in understanding service worker customer orientation, we limit our research to the context in which it operates (i.e., the employee's degree of customer orientation in a service setting). In our research, we distinguish four types of constructs: basic traits, surface traits, specific service behaviors, and performance evaluations. First, basic traits (e.g., agreeability) are enduring dispositions to behave across diverse situational contexts. Second, surface traits (e.g., customer orientation) are enduring dispositions to behave within specific situa'Other examples of surface trails within the marketing literature include compulsive buying (Faber and O'Guinn 1989) and coupon proneness (Lichtenstein, Netemeyer, and Burton 1990), In each case, the trait describes individual differences that influence behavior within the context of a speciflc consumption situation.
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tional contexts. Surface traits differ from basic traits because they are context specific and result from the interaction of basic traits and the situational context. Third, specific service behaviors are on-the-job actions, the measurement of which entails the recording of the actions of the service worker (e.g., number of smiles, mistaken orders, time to respond). TTiese specific actions might be considered in part behavioral outcomes of one or more surface traits; again, surface traits represent dispositions, inclinations, or tendencies to behave in certain ways in certain situations and are more abstract than concrete behaviors. Fourth, performance evaluations, regardless of their source (e.g., self, supervisor, consumer, peers), refer to evaluative judgments of employees' behavior in a particular context. Performance evaluations differ from basic traits, surface traits, and specific service behavior because of their appraisal, or valencing, component (e.g., good/bad, positive/negative). Specifically, for our research, customer orientation is a self-assessment of an employee's tendency to try to meet customer needs and the degree to which he or she enjoys doing so, rather than a measure of the service actions of the service worker or an evaluation of the employee's onthe-job performance. We hypothesize and test relationships among basic traits, customer orientation, and overall performance ratings of service providers within the food service industry. Consistent with the hierarchical model, we anticipate that the disposition to serve customers (i.e., customer orientation) will mediate the relationships between basic personality traits and performance evaluations. Furthermore, we expect that this mediational model will account for more variance in performance ratings than will a model that does not include customer orientation. On the basis of these ideas, we develop our first propositions: P|: Customer orientation will mediate the relationships between basic personality traits and performance ratings, P2: The hierarchical model, with the customer orientation mediation variable, will account for a greater proportion of variance in performance ratings than will a direct model with no mediation, Basic Personality Trait Determinants Scholars have long studied basic personality traits as predictors of human behavior (Wiggins 1996). Researchers such as Costa and McCrae (1985), Goldberg (1992), and Saucier (1994) have generally supported the existence of five basic dimensions of personality. Mowen and Spears (1999) employ structural equation modeling to investigate the five-factor dimensions developed by Saucier (1994). Descriptions of the traits are (1) extraversion (or introversion), representing the degree to which a person is outgoing or shy; (2) (in)stability, which captures the evenness or steadiness of a person's general emotional makeup; (3) agreeability, or general warmth of feelings toward others; (4) conscientiousness, representing the degree of orderliness, organization, and precision; and (5) openness to experience (or creativity), which represents the person's degree of imagination or originality. Previous work investigating customer service behaviors primarily has focused on investigating the relationship between five-factor model traits and the criterion variable of managerial ratings of service performance. Although results differ across studies, the traits of conscientiousness, emo-
tional stability, and agreeability (Frei and McDaniel 1998) as well as extroversion (Hogan, Hogan, and Busch 1984; Hurley 1998a; Spivey, Munson, and Locander 1979) have been found to be predictive of service worker performance ratings. Using our hierarchical model, we investigate the degree to which these effects may be fully or partially mediated through customer orientation. As Hurley's (1998a) and Spivey, Munson, and Locander's (1979) findings suggest, service workers who are high in introversion can be expected to reveal lower customer orientation levels. Such employees may not enjoy customers or want to work with them long enough to identify and satisfy their needs. Accordingly, we expect introversion to exert a negative influence on customer orientation: P3: Introversion will exert a negative influence on customer orientation. Emotional stability, or the degree to which the worker's emotions vary widely, is also expected to be related to the worker's customer orientation (Hogan, Hogan, and Busch 1984), Emotional instability may result in a fluctuating desire to serve customers and meet their needs. The inconsistency of emotion may be associated with weakened ability and/or motivation to serve customers well, P4: Instability will exert a negative influence on customer orientation. Consistent with Hogan, Hogan, and Busch's (1984) and Hurley's (1998a) finding, employees high in agreeability may naturally feel an empathy with their customers and possess a desire to solve their problems through the service they provide. Such employees may well derive personal satisfaction from being able to help others satisfy needs. Therefore, P5: Agreeability will exert a positive influence on customer orientation. Conscientiousness, as noted previously, represents a tendency toward precision and organization. In a sense, conscientiousness may reflect a task orientation, or a need on the part of the service worker to get the job done correctly (i.e., satisfy the customer). In addition, consistent with Frei and McDaniel's (1998) meta-analytic findings, we expect that the behavioral results of conscientiousness (e.g., precision in order taking, showing up for work on time) are relatively concrete and can readily be observed by supervisors and the employees themselves, which leads to a positive relationship between conscientiousness and both supervisor ratings and self-ratings of performance. P^: Conscientiousness will exert a positive influence on customer orientation, P7: Conscientiousness will exert a positive influence on selfand supervisor ratings of performance. Although we do not develop propositions with respect to openness to experience, we include a measure of the construct in our empirical analysis because of its presence in "big five" models of personality. A central issue in research on personality involves whether the fundamental factors that delineate individual differences among humans are limited to five constructs. For example, in personal communications to Goldberg (1993), the respected psychologist R.B. Cattell argues that many more than five factors make up human personality. Simi-
Customer Orientation of Service Workers larly, in a critical analysis of the five-factor approach, Block (1995, p, 187) notes that five factors may emerge because of "unrecognized constraints on the variable sets analyzed," Of particular interest for the present study is another personality variable, need for activity. Buss (1988) proposes that variations in activity levels represent a primary trait among people, on the basis of individual differences in chronic levels of activity found in mammals. People with a high need for activity will tend to complete more tasks and do more things in everyday life. Although we find no prior empirical research on need for activity, we believe that this desire to keep busy and stay active is an important predictor of customer orientation in a services context. Service workers with low need for activity are less likely to be motivated to work at meeting customer needs in a context that requires a degree of activity, Pg: The need for activity will exert a positive influence on customer orientation. Performance Rating Outcomes We expect that customer orientation leads service employees to perform service behaviors that meet customer needs and that both supervisors and the service workers themselves will evaluate these behaviors positively. Accordingly, overall evaluations (by both employees and supervisors) of employee performance should be positively associated with customer orientation, Pg. Customer orientation will exert a positive influence on selfand supervisor ratings of overall performance, METHOD We tested our propositions in a field study of service workers in the food services industry. Specifically, respondents were frontline employees and their supervisors working in restaurants that were located in a midsize community dominated by a large university, A research assistant contacted managers in 35 of the largest restaurants (by number of employees, including both full-service restaurants and fast-food operations) to solicit participation in a study of employee motivation. The local Chamber of Commerce assisted our efforts by writing a letter of support on our behalf. Ultimately, we received matched employee/supervisor responses from 27 firms. The number of matched responses per firm ranged from 2 to 42, with a mean of 10,4 per company,2 Employees completed a questionnaire in which the basic personality traits, customer orientation, and self-ratings of performance were assessed on multi-item scales. To maximize privacy and minimize bias, employees placed completed surveys in sealed envelopes that were gathered and returned to us. Supervisors rated employees on the same performance scales as were completed by employees. We received a total of 280 matched cases; of these, 29 were unusable because of unacceptable levels of missing data, and 2 cases were identified and eliminated as outliers (on the ^To ensure that our results were not overly driven by the employees of any particular company, we repeated our primary analyses after excluding (independently) the responses of employees for the two companies that had each provided more than 10% of the responses. In each case, the results were similar to thosereportedin our "Results" section.
113 basis of a series of preliminary multiple regression analyses), which left 249 cases for analysis. The median age of the employees in our analysis sample was 22 years. Median length of time on the job was 11 months. Furthermore, 63% were women, 31% worked in some type of supervisory capacity, and 43% were full-time employees. Measures Measures for the basic personality traits, introversion, instability, agreeability, conscientiousness, and openness, were identical to those used by Mowen and Spears (1999) and are reported along with their estimates of reliability in the Appendix, Because the construct validity of each of these scales had been established previously, we created an index score (i,e,, mean across items) to represent each construct. We used the index scores as single-item indicants in structural equations models by fixing the path coefficients and error variances on the basis of estimated reliabilities and variances of the index scores (Hair et al, 1998), We developed a measure for the activity personality trait on the basis of Buss's (1988) ideas; preliminary factor and reliability analyses and substantive review of items resulted in a threeitem measure of activity (see the Appendix; a = ,79), To be consistent with procedures used with other basic personality traits, we again created an index score and used it in the structural equations models,^ The customer orientation surface trait was conceptualized as having a needs dimension and an enjoyment dimension. To measure the needs component, we adapted a sixitem Likert-type scale from the measures developed by Saxe and Weitz (1982) by taking the six items with the highest factor loadings on the customer orientation dimension in their research (see the Appendix), Coefficient alpha for this measure of customer orientation was ,87,** We measured the enjoyment component of customer orientation (i,e,, the degree to which service workers enjoy providing service to customers) using a six-item Likert-type measure developed on the basis of discussions with practitioners in the banking and hospitality industries (see the Appendix; a = ,88), In these discussions, we asked participants to describe the distinguishing characteristics of high- and low-performing service employees. Their responses indicated that customer-oriented service employees enjoyed several different aspects of meeting customer needs. Their responses guided the development of the items that were intended to tap the enjoyment dimension, A principle components factor analysis with oblique rotation of the 12 items (i,e,, 6 needs and 6 enjoyment items) indicated a two-factor solution, with all items ^As a check on the appropriateness of using the index scores for the six basic personality traits in our model, we conducted a principle components factor analysis with oblique rotation across all items that formed the six measures, A six-factor solution emerged based on the eigenvalue rule; each item loaded significantly on its appropriate factor, and there were no significant cross-loadings based on the standards suggested by Hair and colleagues (1998). Furthermore, the absolute value interfactor correlations ranged from .01 to .36 with a mean of .13, "•Saxe and Weitz (1982) used both customer orientation items and selling orientation items in their measure. Because the customer orientation and selling orientation items split into separate dimensions when factor analyzed (in both their original research and our current research), we elected to use only customer orientation items for our measure of the needs component of customer orientation.
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Table 1 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS AND BIVARIATE CORRELATIONS Number of Items
Coefficient Alpha
X
(X,) (X2)
3
.86 .88
(XJ)
3 4
3.39 3.90 7.04 6.52 6.20 5.71 6.87 7.06 5.64 5.79 5.41 5.39
Variable Introversion Instability Agreeability Conscientiousness Openness Activity Enjoyment Needs Self 1 Self 2 Supervisor 1
Supervisor 2
(X4) (X5) (Xfi)
(Y,) (Y2) (Y3) (Y4) (Y5) (Y6)
5 5 3 6 6 1 1 1 1
.85 .73 .83 .79 .88 .87 N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A.
Standard Deviation
. 10). Pg states that a need for activity (i.e.. Buss 1988) leads to greater levels of customer orientation, and the results show that this is the case (standardized path coefficient = .26; t = 3.\4,p< .01). Finally, in P9 we predict that customer orientation will affect self- and supervisor ratings of performance. The results demonstrate that customer orientation is related to enhanced self-ratings of performance (standardized path coefficient = .42; t = 4.10, p < .01) and supervisor ratings of performance (standardized path coefficient = .19; t = 1.95, p < .051). These results suggest that customer-oriented service workers are ultimately regarded as better performers. DISCUSSION The basic premise of our research was that implementing the marketing concept is the job of individual service employees for most organizations. We proposed that a worker's degree of customer orientation, or disposition to meet customers' needs, is an important construct that is determined by more basic personality traits and by the press of the specific situational context. Furthermore, we suggested that customer orientation is predictive of service worker performance ratings. Although our results are more suggestive than conclusive, they support each of these proposals. To our knowledge, we are the first researchers to investigate the relationship between basic psychological traits and a measure of customer orientation, which we offer as a key situational determinant of service worker performance in a hierarchical model of the effects of personality on behavior. The combination of six basic psychological traits accounted for 39% of the variance in our measure of customer orientation. In particular, the results reveal that emotional instabil-
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Table 2 RESULTS OF STRUCTURAL EQUATIONS ANALYSES FOR FULL MEDIATION AND PARTIAL MEDIATION MODELS Full Mediation
Path
Standardized Path Coefficient
Partial Mediation
t-Value
Standardized Path Coefficient
t-Vatue
Structural Paths
Introversion -»performance (self) Instability -* performance (selO Agteeability -»performance (self) Conscientiousness —> performance (selO Openness - • performance (selO Activity —» performance (selO Introversion —> performance (supervisor) Instability -^ performance (supervisor) Agreeability —> performance (supervisor) Conscientiousness —> performance (supervisor) Openness -» performance (supervisor) Activity -» performance (supervisor) Introversion -> customer orientation Instability —> customer orientation Agreeability —> customer orientation Conscientiousness —> customer orientation Openness -> customer orientation Activity -> customer orientation Customer orientation -* performance (selO Customer orientation -» performance (supervisor) Correlated Variables Performance (selO «-» performance (supervisor) Measurement Paths Lambda XI Lambda X2 Lambda X3 Lambda X4 Lambda X5 Lambda X^ Lambda YI Lambda Y2 Lambda Y3 Lambda Y4 Lambda Y5 Lambda Y5
.41
.03
.26 .42 .19
-1.27 -.75 2.15* 1.46 -.63 -.08 -.39 -2.20* 3.14** -1.28 -.96 -1.24 -2.21* 4.37** 1.16 .37 3.14** 4.10** 1.95
NA
.31
NA
Fixed Fixed Fixed Fixed Fixed Fixed 11.95** 11.34** 12.24** 12.46** 12.99** 12.97**
.93 .94 .92 .86 .91 .89 .89 .74 .76 .95 .89 .97
Fixed Fixed Fixed Fixed Fixed Fixed 11.59** 11.35** 12.08** 12.35** 14.28** 14.61**
-.11 -.07 .17
.11 -.05 -.01 -.04 -.20
.26
.49 .11
-1.21 -2.31* 4.34** 1.38 .57 3.12** 6.02** 1.50
.33 93 94 92
-.10 -.19 .35 .10 .04
.25
86 91
89 88 74 80 91 93 93
-.11 -.09 -.10 -.18 .36 .09
.03
Model Fit Statistics d.f. RMSEA NNFI CFI Variance Explained (R^) Customer orientation Performance (self) Performance (supervisor)
53.65 36 .04 .96 .98
29.53 24 .03 .98 .99
.40 .24 .01
.39 .26 .12
*p < .05. **p
