When Does Customer-Oriented Leadership Pay Off? An Investigation of Frontstage and Backstage Service Teams

Abstract

The service literature highlights the importance of organizational leaders in creating an organization-wide customer orientation (CO). Yet, some open questions remain regarding this relationship: Are organizational leaders from different hierarchical levels equally effective in creating a CO? Does the functional role of employees affect the importance of certain leaders? More generally, when does customer-oriented leadership really pay off? To address these questions, we investigate how senior managers' and direct supervisors' CO affects the CO climate and effectiveness of both frontstage and backstage service teams. Analyzing multisource data from 575 employees and their supervisors from 110 teams in a retail bank, we find that the effect of perceived senior manager CO on team CO climate and team effectiveness is stronger in backstage teams while perceived direct supervisor CO has a greater influence on frontstage teams. Moreover, team CO climate consensus moderates the effect of team CO climate on team effectiveness. These results suggest that, contrary to past theorizing, customer-oriented leadership does not per se increase team CO climate and team effectiveness; rather, the correct coupling of leadership source and degree of customer contact needs to be achieved. Service managers should use these findings and appoint the correct leader to implement CO to make the organization-wide CO diffusion more efficient and effective.

The effect of customer orientation coaching on employee’s individual performance and financial and non-financial performance

“…As a result, the impact of customer orientation coaching on employee performance was reported to be 0.31 coefficient. This result is the same with the results of previous studies, and this hypothesis was confirmed in the Pousa and Mathieu study (2014) and Herhausen et al (2017). H2 suggests that customer orientation coaching has a direct impact on competitor orientation of employee.…”

“…The impact of the customer orientation of employee on their performance has been reported to be 0.45. This result is the same with the results of previous studies, and this hypothesis was confirmed in Herhausen et al (2017), Pousa and Mathieu study (2014), Boles et al (2001) and Cross et al (2007). H9 suggests that the sale orientation of employee have a direct impact on their performance.…”

Leadership matters in crisis-induced digital transformation: how to lead service employees effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Our literature review emphasizes that, in the limited body of leadership research in the service context, most studies have been conducted in nonvirtual work environments and noncrisis situations (e.g. Wieseke et al , 2011; Benlian, 2014; Herhausen et al , 2017). Consistent with Liao's (2017) statement that the processes and behaviors associated with leading virtual teams to date have been insufficiently investigated, we find barely any work on virtual team leadership in the service context.…”

One size does not fit all: How construal fit determines the effectiveness of organizational brand communication

“…Social distance is a subdimension of psychological distance, which refers to “the extent of divergence from direct experience of me, here and now along the dimensions of time, space, social perspective, or hypotheticality” (Liberman & Trope, 2014, p. 365). We focus on the social dimension of distance because social distance is central to social identity theory (Ashforth & Mael, 1989), because Joshi and Wakslak (2014) as well as Joshi et al (2016) established a clear association between social distance and the construal level of communication, and because previous research in intraorganizational settings used social distance when investigating construal fit between different “actors” and communication aspects (e.g., Berson & Halevy, 2014; Cole et al, 2009; Herhausen et al, 2017).…”

“…Construal level theory further suggests that construal fit determines the effectiveness of organizational communication. The reason is that construal fit increases psychological engagement (Berson & Halevy, 2014), enhances perceived credibility of information (Hansen & Wanke, 2010), intensifies emotional reactions to messages (Lee et al, 2009), and makes communication from a specific source more effective (Herhausen et al, 2017). The combined action of these mechanisms should enhance the effectiveness of organizational communication.…”