Affiliation:
1. School of Business, Samford University.
2. McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia.
3. E.J. Ourso College of Business Administration, Louisiana State University.
Abstract
It is widely held that a customer-oriented firm is more likely to deliver exceptional service quality and create satisfied customers. However, little research has addressed the question of how the orientation can be disseminated among employees throughout the firm. This dissemination is especially important in service firms in which frontline, customer contact employees are responsible for translating a customer-oriented strategy into quality service. The authors propose a structural model that explains how service firms can disseminate their customer-oriented strategy by aligning the strategy with specific management- and employee-initiated control mechanisms (i.e., formalization, empowerment, behavior-based employee evaluation, and work group socialization) that lead to increased commitment and shared values on the part of customer contact employees. The findings indicate that there are three “corridors of influence” between customer-oriented strategy and shared employee values. The dominant corridor, which focuses on dual (management- and employee-initiated) control, emphasizes the importance of work group socialization and organizational commitment in the dissemination of customer-oriented strategy. A secondary corridor focuses on two management-initiated control mechanisms: formalization and behavior-based evaluation. The final corridor, which focuses on the empowerment of customer contact employees, has a more limited impact than originally hypothesized. The authors discuss implications for the implementation of customer-oriented strategy and the management of customer contact employees, along with several directions for further research.
Subject
Marketing,Business and International Management
Cited by
524 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献