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SummaryUsing two waves of store ®nancial data and survey data collected from 34,866 and 34,365 employees and 30,239 and 33,299 customers who shopped at 594 stores of a large U.S. retail company we tested path models relating importance of service to management, service climate variables, sales personnel service performance, and store ®nancial performance. At the store-level of analysis, the results indicated that (a) importance of service to management does relate positively to service climate variables (b) service climate variables are predictive of sales personnel service performance, and (c) sales personnel service performance in turn is predictive of store ®nancial performance. Issues concerning the generalizability of the present ®ndings as well as the implications of these results for eectively managing the internal and external task environments of retail service organizations are discussed.

Confirmatory factor analyses of a priori models of psychological climate were conducted with data collected from 18,457 sales personnel in 567 stores in five regions of a national retail organization. The results provide good support for viewing employee work-climate perceptions as composed of two higher order factors-concern for employees and concern for customers. These higher order factors are posited to reflect employees' cognitive appraisals of the behavior of agents toward (a) employees' well-being in the organization's internal environment and (b) the well-being of other organizational constituencies or stakeholders (e.g., customers) in the task environment, respectively. The implications of a multiple-stakeholder perspective for extending notions of psychological climate are discussed.Recently, James and James (1989) proposed that work-climate perceptions represent valuations or cognitive appraisals of environmental attributes in terms of their acquired meaning and significance to the individual. From James and James's perspective, "Valuation appears to be the key to such cognitive appraisals in asmuch as (a) values serve as standards for assessing welfare (Locke, 1976), where welfare is denned in terms of a sense of well-being. . . and (b) valuation provides appraisals of the degree to which these standards are represented in environmental attributes" (James & James, 1989, pp. 739-740). James and James viewed valuations or cognitive appraisals as "emotional cognitions" because they are hypothesized to reflect the subjective meanings that, in combination with perceived physiological arousal, help to label emotion and to determine the direction and intensity of the experience and the emotion.Drawing from the work of Lazarus (1982Lazarus ( ,1984 and Lazarus and Folkman (1984), James and James (1989) further proposed that all emotionally relevant cognitions reflect a single higher order factor comprising the degree to which the environment is perceived as personally beneficial or detrimental to one's wellbeing. Results of James and James's confirmatory factor analyses on four diverse samples supported a hierarchical factor We would like to express our gratitude to Gary Kaufman for arranging access to the data, to Terry LaDu for preparing the data, and Gita Johar for assistance in reviewing items. We would also like to thank

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