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Customer-focused voice and rule-breaking in the frontlines

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Abstract

Customer-oriented frontline employees are motivated by a strong desire to help customers. While such motivation enhances customer outcomes, it can also encourage frontline employees to engage in customer-directed prosocial behaviors that undermine organizational norms. We consider such a possibility and find that: (1) in their quest to satisfy customers’ needs, customer-oriented employees engage in customer-focused voice and/or pro-customer rule breaking, (2) the extent to which employees perform these behaviors depends on whether they identify with the organization or customers, (3) customer-focused voice enhances while pro-customer rule breaking hinders role performance, (4) the net performance consequences of a customer orientation can be positive or negative, and (5) various contingency factors determine whether rule breaking results in lower performance ratings from supervisors. These findings offer evidence of a customer orientation dark side and, paradoxically, underscore that internally focused marketing efforts are critical for a customer orientation to enhance frontline employee performance.

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Notes

  1. We underscore that we did not test (and thus do not attempt to model) a 3-way interaction. Rather, our visual (Figure 2) illustrates the joint effect of two competing moderators (i.e., two, 2-way interactions) in order to establish when each type of prosocial behavior is more likely to occur as a function of common identification conditions. Simple slope moderation graphs that consider each moderator in isolation are provided in the Web Appendix for interested readers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marketing Department, New Mexico State University College of Business, Las Cruces, NM, USA

    Gabriel Gazzoli

  2. Department of Marketing, E.J. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Nawar N. Chaker

  3. Department of Marketing, Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Alex R. Zablah

  4. School of Marketing and International Business, Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

    Tom J. Brown

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  1. Gabriel Gazzoli
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Gazzoli, G., Chaker, N.N., Zablah, A.R. et al. Customer-focused voice and rule-breaking in the frontlines. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 50, 388–409 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-021-00798-8

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