Jsm 09-2013-0237

Journal of Services Marketing
The role of external customer mind-set among service employees
Rajesh Iyer Mark C Johlke
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The role of external customer mind-set
among service employees
Rajesh Iyer and Mark C. Johlke
Department of Marketing, Bradley University, Peoria, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to develop and test a model of the antecedents and outcomes of one aspect of customer mind-set (CMS) –
external CMS (ECMS) — among front-line employees. The goal of this paper is to help managers address customer-level orientation by further
investigating the external dimension of CMS (referred to as ECMS).
Design/methodology/approach – Data were gathered from a sample of front-line employees of a variety of firms located in a mid-sized
southeastern US city.
Findings – The results indicate that greater amounts of job autonomy and job satisfaction are positively associated with front-line employee ECMS,
while the employee’s global role ambiguity, customer-specific ambiguity and role conflict are negatively associated with ECMS. In turn, front-line
employee ECMS is associated with increased work motivation and sales performance.
Research limitations/implications – The data are cross-sectional in nature; so, strictly causal relations cannot be inferred from these results. Also,
the sample primarily consists of younger females with less work experience and who are employed at smaller organizations. Therefore, future
research should further test these relations in different samples to increase the robustness of the results.
Practical implications – This research utilizes a rich description of the front-line employee’s job attitudes and work characteristics to build a model
describing their association with the extent to which the ideas of market orientation have taken hold at the operational level and their relationship
with the employee’s motivation and subsequent performance. It shows that both internal and external characteristics are associated with front-line
employee ECMS, which itself is very strongly related to desirable job outcomes.
Originality/value – The firm’s financial performance is most directly affected by how well it serves its external customers. However, there has been
no research on the role and the consequences of employee ECMS. There are only a few studies (less than five) that have empirically explored the
CMS. Therefore, the many potential benefits from a deeper understanding of a market orientation culture and behaviors at the level of the front-line
employee remain unclear, particularly in regards to its ECMS dimension.
Keywords Job satisfaction, Job performance, Turnover intention, Customer ambiguity, External customer mind set, Front-line salespeople
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Two of marketing’s most influential contributions to business
philosophy and practice have been the related ideas of the
marketing concept and of market orientation. An important
aspect of both of these ideas is that all of the firm’s employees
should be aware of and focused upon properly serving the
firm’s customers. While an extensive body of research shows
that greater levels of market orientation across the firm are
associated with an increased firm performance (Kirca et al.,
2005), it is at the operational level of the firm’s front-line
employees where the actual building and managing customer
relationships occurs. As a result, researchers and managers
continue to focus their efforts towards understanding the
factors associated with increased customer orientation and
service among front-line, customer-contact employees.
The service literature implicitly assumes that front-line
employees share a common understanding of the meaning of
customer service (Mascio, 2010), and as these employees
represent the face and voice of their organization their
attitudes and behaviors significantly influence the quality of
customer service (Hartline and Ferrell, 1996; Schneider et al.,
1992; Elmadag et al., 2008). Research in the services literature
has also suggested that service quality is influenced by the level
of managerial commitment and behavior. For example,
Parkington and Schneider (1979) found that the employee’s
self-orientation to service and employees perceptions of
management’s orientation to service were positively associated
with performance-related outcomes. While at the operational
level, front-line personnel have been found to directly affect
customer perceptions of service quality, satisfaction and value
(Brady and Cronin, 2001), other factors external to these
employees and their immediate work environment also play an
important role in their performance and subsequent customer
satisfaction. In general, these external factors are a mixture of
those that have been pre-established at higher levels of the
organization and so are usually beyond the employee’s control
(e.g. the firm’s advertising and promotion efforts, its products,
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
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29/1 (2015) 38–48
© Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0887-6045]
[DOI 10.1108/JSM-09-2013-0237]
Received 7 September 2013
Revised 17 March 2014
Accepted 19 April 2014
38
Past history/ background
strength

their prices and availability) and those that are simply beyond
the control of anyone in the organization (e.g. general
economic conditions and competitor actions). Therefore,
many researchers concentrate their efforts on understanding
those factors operating at the operational level of the
individual front-line employee, as they may offer the most
efficient and direct means to improve employee and customer
outcomes. With all of this in mind, Kennedy et al. (2002)
developed the concept of customer mind-set (CMS) as a way
to conceptualize and measure the degree to which the firm’s
level of market orientation extends all the way to the beliefs of
its individual front-line employees.
Defined as:
[. . .] the extent to which an individual employee believes that
understanding and satisfying customers, whether internal or external to the
organization, is central to the proper execution of his or her job (Kennedy
et al., 2002, p. 159), they propose that CMS “will allow for operational-level
analysis of the extent to which a customer orientation is embraced
throughout an organization, permitting managers to implement targeted
improvement strategies”(Kennedy et al., 2002).
The goal of this research project is to help managers do exactly
this by further investigating the potential antecedents and
employee outcomes associated with the external, customer-
oriented dimension of CMS (henceforth referred to as
ECMS). First, a model containing potential antecedents
and outcomes of front-line employee ECMS is developed
by drawing upon findings from the sales, marketing,
management, services and organizational behavior literatures.
The hypothesized model is shown in Figure 1. Next, the
methodology used to test the hypothesized model on a sample
of front-line employees is described, and the outcomes and
implications of the findings are discussed. As the results
broadly support the proposed model, both managers and
researchers are provided with a better understanding of the
nature and structure of this important front-line employee
belief.
2. Customer mind-set
Kennedy et al. (2002, p. 159) observe that marketing research
has provided firms with a “prescriptive theme for success”, i.e.
market orientation, and that firms must develop an
organizational culture that embraces and implements its
prescriptions. The foundation of CMS is firmly grounded in
the theory of market orientation, which itself is founded on the
three pillars of customer focus, integrated marketing and
long-term goal attainment. Deshpande (1999) concluded that
market orientation operates at three levels within the
organization: as a culture, a strategy and as tactics. The
cultural aspect of market orientation focuses on the shared
values and beliefs that put customers first in the organization.
As a strategy, market orientation assists in the creation of value
for its customers, while as a tactic it assures that the functional
processes and activities are aimed at satisfying the customers.
Every organization that wishes to develop a marketing
orientation must identify their customers, coordinate a strategic
response and monitor the success of its implementation in that it
permeates through all operations of the organization and is
accepted by individual workers at every level (Kennedy et al.,
2002). Accordingly, market orientation researchers (Kohli
and Jaworski, 1990; Saxe and Weitz, 1982; Schneider and
Bowen, 1985) have primarily focused on work climates as
manifested in the organization’s activities and its employee’s
behaviors. CMS focuses on culture which helps understand
the extent to which workers within an organization have
embraced the idea of customer-oriented beliefs.
While these researchers have found that higher levels of
market orientation within organizations are consistently
associated with increased firm performance, most of this
research has used the organization itself as the unit of analysis
and so have depended upon top managers to evaluate and
report an aggregate, firm-wide level of market orientation
and performance. This method has clearly provided managers
and researchers with extremely useful insights, yet its reliance
on a “top-down” view of the firm may obscure important gaps
in understanding and implementing market orientation at
lower levels of the organization. In other words, as a market
orientation culture needs to be built and exercised at all
organizational levels, for a firm to wring maximum benefits
from its market orientation what is needed is an accurate
means to analyze its application at lower levels of the firm,
especially at the operational level. As a result, Kennedy et al.
(2002) developed the CMS concept and described its two
separate dimensions based on who actually receives the
employee’s work output.
The first dimension, internal CMS (ICMS), expressly refers
to those individuals or departments within the same firm who
receive the output of another’s work, e.g. a firm’s production
capabilities affect product availability and thus the sales force’s
ability to promise delivery dates, etc. In a services context, this
can be seen in a chef’s recognition and mindfulness that his/
her ability to properly prepare dishes in a timely manner has a
direct and substantial effect on the wait staff’s ability to
serve the customers who choose to dine at that restaurant. The
second dimension, external CMS (ECMS), refers to those
individuals or entities situated outside of the firm who receive
the output of an employee’s work, e.g. primarily customers
who purchase and use the firm’s products. Kennedy et al.
(2002) developed and tested separate scales to measure each
dimension and found that they exhibited acceptable
unidimensionality, reliability, discriminant validity (by virtue
of being found distinct from the customer orientation
component of the Selling Orientation/Customer Orientation
(SOCO) scale, and nomological validity (due to both
dimensions being significantly correlated with employee job
satisfaction, organizational commitment and self-reported job
performance). These authors concluded their initial research
on the CMS by describing a variety of ways in which
understanding the CMS would benefit firms, as well as several
potential research streams that could lead to these benefits.
Unfortunately, the authors wish that the CMS concept
would inspire significant additional research on front-line
employee CMS has yet to be fulfilled. While the original work
on CMS has been cited in research across a variety of topics,
only one other paper has further empirically explored CMS,
namely, its ICMS dimension (Lassk et al., 2004). Other
researchers have discussed internal marketing and a concept
similar to CMS, individual-level market orientation (IMO)
and examined its role in employee in-role behaviors (Lings
and Greenley, 2010) and how market orientation is diffused
from upper to operational levels within a firm Lam et al.
(2010). Lings and Greenley (2010, p. 321) described IMO as
External customer mind-set
Volume 29 · Number 1 · 2015 · 38–48
39

“an ongoing marketing focus within a company that is
directed at employees. It aligns and motivates employees with
a company’s market objectives”. However, because IMO is
explicitly focused on a firm’s internal activities it does not
provide a direct means to understand the relations between
employee customer-service attitudes and job outcomes. While
it is important that firms properly serve both their internal and
external customers because the firm’s financial performance is
most directly affected by how well it serves external customers,
and that there has been no research on the role and
consequences of employee ECMS, only ECMS will be
considered in this study.
2.1 Antecedents to ECSM
In the only study that specifically investigated potential
antecedents to either aspect of CMS, Lassk et al. (2004)
considered employee attitudes (i.e. job satisfaction and
organizational commitment) to be potential antecedents to
ICMS. This structure reflects CMS’s basis in the original
conceptualization of market orientation as an organizational-
level concept (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990) as well as the
extensive body of literature on its organizational-
level antecedents and outcomes. In addition, they considered
its relations with employee job performance and turnover
intent. As Lassk et al.’s (2004) results supported this general
“employee attitudes ¡ CMS ¡ employee job outcomes”
structure, it will be utilized and expanded upon in this study of
ECMS. In this study, only a set of potential antecedents that
have been established as strongly relevant to front-line
employees or that are directly amenable to managerial action
will be considered.
There exists an extensive body of research across a wide
variety of settings that suggests that employee job satisfaction
is positively associated with pro-customer attitudes and
behaviors (e.g. Brown and Lam, 2008; Bradford et al., 2009).
According to Hoffman and Ingram (1992, p. 70), job
satisfaction is an antecedent of customer-oriented behavior,
especially in service-based industries. Based on the theory of
social exchange (Homans, 1958), it can be argued that the
service provider benefits both extrinsically (e.g. financial
rewards) and intrinsically (e.g. job fulfillment) by satisfying
the customer, and that the likelihood of this is greater when
the service provider is in a positive mood (Boshoff and Allen,
2000). Motowidlo (1984, p. 911) suggests that satisfied
workers are more likely to be a good mood and, hence, likely
to behave sensitively and considerately towards others and to
Figure 1 Conceptual model of the hypothesized relationship
Role Ambiguity
Role Conflict
Job Satisfaction
Job Autonomy
Customer Ambiguity
External Customer
Mind-Set
Work Motivation
Job Performance
−
−
++
−
+
+
+
Volume 29 · Number 1 · 2015 · 38–48
40

deliver exceptional service (Rogers et al., 1994). This stands to
reason, as employees who experience the positive feeling of
being satisfied with their job are more likely to consequently
act in a positive manner by “going the extra mile” in
completing their tasks and to empathize with those who
depend upon them to properly fulfill their role. Not
surprisingly, Lassk et al. (2004) found that employee job
satisfaction is positively associated with employee ICMS, and
as it is closely related to ECMS the first hypothesis states:
H1. Employee job satisfaction is positively associated with
ECMS.
One of the most extensively researched group of employee
attitudes are the employee’s role variables, primarily role
conflict and role ambiguity. Kahn et al. (1964, p. 73)
described role ambiguity as being “a direct function of the
discrepancy between the information available to the person
and that which is required”, and it has consistently been found
to be negatively associated with other attitudes and with job
outcomes (Brown and Peterson, 1993; Brashear et al., 2003).
The effects of role ambiguity have been heavily studied among
many organizational positions, especially boundary spanners
and the vast majority of this research has used the Rizzo et al.
(1970) scale that conceptualizes ambiguity as a global,
unidimensional construct. Zeithaml et al. (1988) point out
that role ambiguity occurs when employees are unsure as to
the duties they are expected to perform. Front-line staff
and salespeople engaged in boundary-spanning roles are
particularly vulnerable to role ambiguity as they generally
receive very little formal training and minimal supervision
(Dubinsky and Mattson, 1979). Strong theoretical arguments
for the negative relationship in service situations have been
provided by Jackson and Schuler (1985) who claim that when
the front-line staff lacks knowledge about the most effective
behaviors their efforts become insufficient or inappropriate.
More recently, Singh and Rhoads (1991) developed a
multidimensional conceptualization of role ambiguity and the
MULTIRAM scale to measure each of its proposed seven
facets, and they were able to show that different facets of
ambiguity can be differently associated with various boundary
spanner job outcomes (Singh, 1993; Rhoads et al., 1994).
Instead of suggesting that other researchers should always use
all seven of the ambiguity facets they encouraged using only
those of greatest relevance to a particular study. Accordingly,
the MULTIRAM facet that is most applicable to the front-
line employee’s day-to-day work environment, ambiguity
specifically regarding customers, will also be used in this
study. More specifically:
H2. Employee global role ambiguity is negatively associated
with ECMS.
H3. Employee customer-specific ambiguity is negatively
associated with ECMS.
Role conflict simply refers to “when the behaviors expected of
an individual are inconsistent” (Rizzo et al., 1970, p. 151) or,
more specifically, when the expectations arising from an
individual’s multiple roles clash. Like ambiguity, role conflict
has been extensively studied among many types of employees
across many types of work and life environments and it has
consistently been found to be negatively associated with
employee emotional and physical job outcomes (Jackson and
Schuler, 1985) and job performance (Tubre and Collins,
2000). In particular, organizational factors seem to have a
particularly strong impact on the employee’s perceptions of
role conflict, which itself is primarily manifested by negative
attitudinal and behavioral reactions by the employee (Jackson
and Schuler, 1985). Because front-line employees are the link
between the firm and the customer and they must satisfy the
needs of both parties they seem to be particularly prone to role
conflict.
There are many potential sources of role conflict for
front-line service personnel. Researchers have identified the
presence of multiple role senders as one such cause (Dubinsky
and Mattson, 1979; Shamir, 1980; Zeithaml et al., 1988,
1990). Zeithaml et al. (1990) found that role conflict is
particularly severe in firms where selling is given a priority over
providing service. There are strong theoretical reasons to
believe that high levels of role conflict would be negatively
associated with the ECMS. If an employee is not comfortable
performing a task, they are not likely to perform it well.
Besides, if front-line employees are experiencing role conflict
they would feel stressed and uncomfortable which would be
reflected in them having an overall negative attitude in terms
of their ECMS. Given that this nomological structure
corresponds with that used by Lassk et al. (2004) in their study
of ICMS, and that role conflict and role ambiguity are often
exist in tandem, it stands to reason that employee role conflict
may be associated with his or her attitude and beliefs regarding
the importance of serving customers. Unfortunately, there
have been no studies on the potential relationship between
role conflict and either form of CMS and so the following
hypothesis will be tested:
H4. Employee role conflict is negatively associated with
ECMS.
As CMS is the individual employee’s manifestation of the
firm’s level of market orientation, those factors found to be
associated with firm-level market orientation may offer an
additional category of antecedents to ECMS. In their meta-
analysis, Kirca et al. (2005) found that interdepartmental
connectedness, i.e. the amount of formal and informal direct
contacts among employees across departments, is the
strongest antecedent to firm-level market orientation. At the
level of individual employees, this connectedness is likely to be
dependent on the amount of job autonomy that the employees
have in accomplishing their tasks. Defined as “the degree to
which the job provides substantial freedom, independence,
and discretion to the employee” (Hackman and Oldham,
1980, p. 79), including the freedom to develop and maintain
contacts with others, job autonomy has consistently been
found to be associated with improved employee job outcomes
(Fried and Ferris, 1987; Dart, 1988; Bhuian and Menguc,
2002). While no studies were found that examined the
relations among marketing employee job autonomy and
market orientation, Barnabas and Mekoth (2010) did find a
positive association between the amount of goal-setting
autonomy among boundary-spanning retail bankers and the
employing firm’s level of market orientation. Job autonomy
Volume 29 · Number 1 · 2015 · 38–48
41

may also be associated with ECMS because it is directly
amendable to managerial action, as customer-contact
employees who work in an autonomous environment have
more freedom to develop their own set of work-related actions
and attitudes, including those associated with their co-workers
and their customers. Logically, front-line employees operating
within a culture in which they are given a greater degree of
autonomy and freedom to interact with others are more likely
to develop a deeper pool of knowledge and behaviors
regarding others, including a stronger appreciation of the
importance of their work and its effect on their customers.
Accordingly, the next hypothesis is:
H5. Job autonomy is positively associated with employee
ECMS.
2.2 Outcomes of ECMS
The proposed model’s framework to explain employee job
outcomes associated with ECMS is based upon the job
demands–resources (JD-R) theory. According to the JD-R
theory, every job has its factors associated with employee
engagement and these demands and resources interact to
influence employee job outcomes, including motivation and
job performance (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007). For front-
line employees, engagement levels are a function of the
resources available to employees and of the actual demands of
the job itself (Zablah et al., 2012). One form of engagement,
motivation, reflects the employee’s intention to act and can be
initiated by the self or induced externally. Motivated behavior
refers to “the performance of an activity to attain some
separable outcome” (Ryan and Deci, 2000, p. 71), and all
forms of extrinsic regulation act as motivators through the use
of reward or punishment. Consequently, motivation exerts a
strong impact on behavior and performance (Meyer et al.,
2004).
Because ECMS specifically refers to the employee’s attitude
regarding the importance of satisfying customers this attitude
is also likely to be made manifest in increased motivation,
which is associated with improved performance (Brown et al.,
1997, 1998). At present, the existence and strength of any
relationships between ECMS and employee job outcomes
have not been fully investigated. This is unfortunate, as
understanding and developing employee CMS may offer
managers a powerful means to influence employee job
outcomes, just as developing market orientation at the
organizational level is associated with improved firm outcomes
(Kirca et al., 2005). Lassk et al. (2004) found that ICMS is
positively related to improved employee job performance and
reduced turnover intention, and Lam et al. (2010) found that
salesperson individual market orientation is also associated
with improved job performance. Therefore, it is reasonable to
expect that ECMS would likewise be associated with improved
employee job performance among service employees. This study
will be the first to examine the empirical association between
ECMS and these important employee job outcomes, namely,
that:
H6. Employee ECMS is positively associated with work
motivation.
H7. Employee ECMS is positively associated with sales
performance.
H8. Employee work motivation is positively associated with
sales performance.
3. Methodology
3.1 Data collection and sample
Data were gathered from a sample of front-line employees of
a variety of firms located in a mid-sized southeastern US city.
Following established field research data gathering procedures
(e.g. Arnold and Reynolds, 2003; Bitner et al., 1990; Jones
and Reynolds, 2006), one of the researchers recruited
undergraduate college students and trained them to
administer a printed survey using proper data collection
procedures. These students were then instructed to select and
visit different businesses to explain the nature of the research
study to the first employee who approached them, and to ask
that he/she participate by completing a questionnaire form.
Those who agreed to participate in the study completed the
questionnaire at that time and immediately returned it to the
student helper. The employees were required to provide their
name and contact information to verify their participation in
the study. Only 16 employees refused to participate in the
study. Later that day, student helpers gave the completed
questionnaires to the researchers. The entire data collection
process lasted three weeks and a total of 477 completed
questionnaires were completed. After all questionnaires had
been gathered the employees received a follow-up phone call
from the researcher’s secretary thanking them for participating
in the study and to verify that they had actually completed the
questionnaire themselves. Next, the researchers reviewed each
questionnaire form to identify and delete those from any
employee who did not clearly and directly interact with
external customers (e.g. officer workers). This procedure led
to a final sample of 362 usable responses. The average
respondent was a female, aged 16-35 years, with an
undergraduate degree, and who had worked at the employing
firm between 1 and 5 years.
3.2 Construct operationalization
All items used in the analysis were adapted from established
scales and are shown in Table I. Optimally, an objective
indicator of sales performance (e.g. percentage of quota, total
dollar sales, etc.) would have been used to measure performance,
but as the sample consisted of respondents from a variety of
firms, a common measure of performance was not available.
Unfortunately, managerial rankings could not be used either, as
not all the firms in the sample would make their internal
employee evaluations available to the researchers. Instead, only
the items in the widely used Behrman and Perreault (1982) scale
that specifically focus on sales success were adapted for this
study. All subsequent discussions of performance refer to the
employee’s self-reported performance ratings.
Role conflict and role ambiguity were measured using items
from the Rizzo et al. (1970) scale, while customer-specific
ambiguity was measured using items adapted from Singh and
Rhoads (1991). Job autonomy was measured using items from
Sims et al. (1976) and job satisfaction was measured using the
Churchill et al. (1974) scale. The work motivation scale was
Volume 29 · Number 1 · 2015 · 38–48
42

adapted from Oliver and Anderson (1994) and items to
measure ECMS were adapted from Kennedy et al. (2002).
3.3 Measures and purification
Following a process recommended by Anderson and Gerbing
(1988), the measurement quality of the indicators was
evaluated. Anderson and Gerbing (1988) recommend that
researchers first refine the measurement model before testing
the structural component of the model. The goal is a final set
of items with acceptable discriminant and convergent validity,
internal consistency, reliability and parsimony. Every factor in
this study was submitted to a confirmatory factor analysis and
Table I Measurement items
Scale/Itemsa
Standardized loading (t-values) Source/adapted from
Role ambiguity (CR ‫؍‬ 0.87; VE ‫؍‬ 0.69) Rizzo et al. (1970)
I have clear planned goals and objectives for my job 0.83 (18.44)
Explanation is clear of what has to be done at work 0.89 (20.28)
I feel certain about how much authority I have at work 0.77 (16.48)
Role Conflict (CR ‫؍‬ 0.85; VE ‫؍‬ 0.66) Rizzo et al. (1970)
At my current firm/organization
[. . .] I receive incompatible requests from two or more people 0.81 (17.31)
[. . .] I receive an assignment without the human resources to complete it 0.83 (17.94)
Job autonomy (CR ‫؍‬ 0.89; VE ‫؍‬ 0.73) Sims et al. (1976)
The amount of freedom that I have to do pretty much what I want to do
on my job is [. . .] 0.85 (19.20)
The amount of opportunity that I have for independent thought and
action at this job is [. . .] 0.89 (20.89)
The amount of control that I have over the pace of my work is [. . .] 0.82 (18.43)
Job satisfaction (CR ‫؍‬ 0.79; VE ‫؍‬ 0.56) Churchill et al. (1974)
I am generally satisfied:
[. . .] with the support provided by my firm/organization 0.87 (18.72)
[. . .] with my salary or wages at my firm/organization 0.67 (13.39)
[. . .] with my fellow workers at my firm/organization 0.69 (13.95)
Customer ambiguity (CR ‫؍‬ 0.96; VE ‫؍‬ 0.90) Singh and Rhoads (1991)
I am certain how I should behave with customers while on the job 0.95 (24.26)
I am certain which specific company strengths should I present to my
customers 0.97 (24.94)
In my job, I am certain how much service I should provide to my
Job performance (CR ‫؍‬ 0.93; VE ‫؍‬ 0.82) Behrman and Perreault (1982)
I am better than average in identifying and working with important
I am better than average in providing service to customers 0.95 (24.14)
I often exceed the targets and objectives that are assigned to me 0.90 (21.79)
External customer mindset (CR ‫؍‬ 0.92; VE ‫؍‬ 0.73) Kennedy et al. (2002)
I believe that [. . .]
[. . .] I ensure that employees who depend on my work output
communicate with me 0.87 (20.57)
[. . .] A process exists to help me understand what’s expected from my
work output 0.85 (19.81)
[. . .] I would change my job task to help other employees do their job
better 0.85 (19.53)
[. . .] I focus on the requirements of the person who receives my work 0.86 (20.24)
Work motivation (CR ‫؍‬ 0.89; VE ‫؍‬ 0.72) Oliver and Anderson (1994)
My opinion of myself goes up when I do this job well 0.85 (19.54)
I feel a great sense of personal satisfaction when I do this job well 0.95 (23.47)
Most people on this job feel a great sense of personal satisfaction when
they do this job well 0.74 (16.13)
Notes: a
Composite reliability (CR); variance extracted (VE) are provided for each scale
Volume 29 · Number 1 · 2015 · 38–48
43

all factor loadings were significant at the 0.01 level and all
individual reliabilities were above the required value of 0.4
(Bagozzi and Baumgartner, 1994). As per Bagozzi and Yi
(1988) and Bagozzi and Baumgartner (1994), a composite
reliability of at least 0.7 is desirable. This requirement was
met. After assessing the individual factors, the reduced set of
items was subjected together to a confirmatory factor analysis
using maximum likelihood estimation via LISREL 8.5.
Table II reports construct inter-correlations and additional
information on the reliability and validity of these measures.
Although the chi-square value for the measurement model
is significant (642.54 with 247 d.f, p Ͻ 0.001), other
goodness-of- fit measures indicate a good overall fit of the
model to the data: RMSEA ϭ 0.06 (Baumgartner and
Homburg, 1996), NNFI ϭ 0.97, IFI ϭ 0.98 and CFI ϭ 0.98.
3.4 Construct validity assessment
Additional analyses were conducted to provide more
confidence concerning the measurement properties of the
scale. The next step was assessing the validity of the model.
Each of the items exhibited acceptable loadings (path
estimate Ͼ 0.50) and is significant (t-value Ͼ 2.0), thus
indicating acceptable convergent validity. As evidence of
discriminant validity, none of the confidence intervals of the
phi matrix included 1.00 (Anderson and Gerbing, 1988). In
addition, the amount of variance extracted for each construct
was compared with the squared phi estimates (Fornell and
Larcker, 1981) and the estimates for all constructs was greater
than the squared phi estimate, further supporting sufficient
discrimination between the variables. All factor loadings are
significantly different from zero, as evidenced by their
consistently large t-values. Finally, the reliability of the scales
was assessed via the calculation of composite reliability scores.
These scores ranged from 0.79 to 0.96, all of which are above
the cutoff of 0.6 suggested by Bagozzi and Yi (1991). Based on
these results, the measures have sufficient validity and
reliability and so allow testing the hypothesized model.
4. Results
The hypotheses were tested within the framework of structural
equation modeling through LISREL 8.5 (Joreskog and
Sorbom, 1993) using the items shown in Table I. The results
of the hypotheses test are shown in Table III. The fit of the
data to the proposed model is quite good: (␹2
(257) ϭ 829.68,
p Ͻ 0.01; RMSEA ϭ 0.07; IFI ϭ 0.96; CFI ϭ 0.96;
NNFI ϭ 0.96) and all proposed paths are significant (see
Table III), thus supporting both the model’s structure as well
as the individual hypotheses. The model explains 60 per cent
of the variance in employee ECMS, 52 per cent of their work
motivation and 56 per cent of their self-reported performance.
Our study tested for common method variance using the
marker variable approach (Fang et al., 2008) and found
no evidence that it was biasing the overall results. As
hypothesized, the complete set of internal and external employee
factors used in this research are associated with the degree to
which front-line employees believe that serving and satisfying
external customers is important, while enhanced employee
ECMS is related to improved work motivation and performance.
5. Discussion
The first section of the proposed model describes the relations
between five front-line employee job characteristics or
attitudes and their level of ECMS. The first employee attitude,
job satisfaction, is important because managers want their
employees to be satisfied with their work both for humane
reasons and for its widely assumed connection with improved
performance. While the potential relationship between job
satisfaction and performance has been extensively debated
and researched there is still no clearly accepted consensus if
they are directly related in any meaningful way (Brown and
Peterson, 1993) and so many researchers have shifted their
attention to identifying intervening constructs that may tie
them together. This research suggests that ECMS may be one
such variable, as job satisfaction was found to be directly
and positively associated with ECMS (H1: completely
standardized path estimate ϭ 0.16, t-value ϭ 2.46). Stated
another way, it appears that employees who are satisfied with
their work are more likely to develop other positive attitudes,
including the importance of serving their customers, which
itself is associated with increased motivation and performance.
(H6 and H7, discussed below). Accordingly, managers are
advised to look for ways to improve the level of job satisfaction
within their front-line employees, as the benefits of doing so
may extend to these highly desirable work outcomes.
The second and third job attitudes proposed to be
antecedent to employee ECMS are the amounts of generalized
Table II Construct correlations, means, standard deviations and coefficient alphas
Construct 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Role ambiguity 1
Role conflict Ϫ0.218‫ءء‬
1
Job satisfaction 0.425‫ءء‬
0.285‫ءء‬
1
Job autonomy 0.331‫ءء‬
Ϫ0.070 0.375‫ءء‬
1
Work motivation 0.367‫ءء‬
Ϫ0.059 0.446‫ءء‬
0.493‫ءء‬
1
Customer ambiguity 0.308‫ءء‬
Ϫ0.134‫ء‬
0.347‫ءء‬
0.445‫ءء‬
0.526‫ءء‬
1
Job performance 0.353‫ءء‬
Ϫ0.049 0.308‫ءء‬
0.450‫ءء‬
0.552‫ءء‬
0.693‫ءء‬
1
External customer mind-set 0.302‫ءء‬
Ϫ0.07 0.334‫ءء‬
0.389‫ءء‬
0.559‫ءء‬
0.524‫ءء‬
0.569‫ءء‬
1
Mean 6.06 3.26 5.24 5.33 5.60 6.22 5.84 5.79
SD 1.02 1.71 1.23 1.28 1.23 1.04 1.14 1.15
Coefficient alpha 0.81 0.81 0.71 0.86 0.85 0.94 0.90 0.88
Notes: ‫ءء‬
Correlation significant at p Ͻ 0.01; ‫ء‬
correlation significant at p Ͻ 0.05
Volume 29 · Number 1 · 2015 · 38–48
44

role ambiguity (H2) and of customer-specific ambiguity (H3)
that employees experience. These results show that both
generalized uncertainty, as well as their specific uncertainly
about how to deal with their customers (i.e. the central focus
of their work) are both negatively associated with employee
attitudes about the importance of taking care of their
customers (H2: completely standardized path estimate ϭ Ϫ0.13,
t-value ϭ Ϫ2.26; H3: completely standardized path estimate ϭ
Ϫ0.55, t-value ϭ Ϫ9.55). In other words, the more
uncertainty that front-line employees experience in their jobs
and in regards to interacting with their customers, the less they
perceive that it is important to properly serve them. While
employee uncertainty about both their job and their customers
appear to be important antecedent to their customer service
attitudes, and ultimately their motivation and performance,
the effect of front-line employee ambiguity regarding their
customers is more than twice as strong as any other factor.
Therefore, managers should make sure that the firm’s training
and other practices, as well as his or her coaching, feedback
and other interactions with these employees contribute to
reducing the level of customer-related ambiguity that they
experience. Based on these results, it may not be an
overstatement to say that managers of front-line employees
should focus on addressing this element of their employees
work environment first and foremost.
The fourth and final employee attitude proposed to be an
antecedent to ECMS was role conflict (H4). As expected,
greater amounts of employee role conflict were also strongly
associated with reduced ECMS (completely standardized path
estimate ϭ Ϫ0.20, t-value ϭ Ϫ4.14). Accordingly, managers
should also be aware of those areas of the front-line
employee’s work environment that clash and thus lead to
contradictory or incompatible demands and expectations. For
example, firms or managers may proclaim one thing (e.g.
“serving the customer is our top priority”) but the actual
practices and reward structure support something totally
different (e.g. “we’d better meet our quarterly numbers”). In
these types of situations where employees are caught between
the “rock-and-a-hard place” of conflicting demands and
expectations they are likely to be overly cautious, they may
engage in withdrawal behavior, and as these results suggest are
less likely to develop the pro-customer service attitudes
necessary for firms to truly implement the marketing concept.
The last potential antecedent to ECMS that was
investigated in this study was a factor external to the front-line
employee, namely, the amount of job autonomy in their work
environment (H5). While employee attitudes are primarily
internal factors and so are less amenable to direct managerial
influence, external factors are by their very nature much more
susceptible to a manager’s control. In this study, greater
amounts of employee job autonomy were also found to be
associated with improved employee ECMS (completely
standardized path estimate ϭ 0.11, t-value ϭ 2.02). This
suggests that one of the ways in which employees choose to
apply greater degrees of job autonomy in their work
environment is by developing increased appreciation for the
importance of taking care of customers. Therefore, to foster
this highly desirable attitude among their operational-level
employees, managers should look for ways to give them
greater leeway in their tasks and in how best to complete them.
Regarding the proposed set of consequence from employee
ECSM, these results indicate that ECMS is positively
associated with both work motivation (H6; completely
standardized path estimate ϭ 0.72, t-value ϭ 13.61) and
performance (H7; completely standardized path estimate ϭ
0.53, t-value ϭ 7.98). Similar to findings at the organizational
level, individual employee attitudes about the importance of
understanding and serving their customers are clearly
associated with higher job performance, both directly and via
improved work motivation (H8; completely standardized path
estimate ϭ 0.27, t-value ϭ 4.22). These results suggest that
employee ECMS is an important, but heretofore unexamined,
antecedent to performance and so managers should look for
ways to develop their front-line employee’s understanding and
appreciation of the customer’s central importance to the firm
and employee’s success. For example, managers could use
ECMS as a tool in selecting front-line employees, as a main
component in employee training, as well as a criterion in
evaluating them. In addition, as employees often model their
supervisor’s attitudes and behaviors, it is important that
managers work to develop and exhibit their own pro-customer
beliefs.
In conclusion, this research utilized a rich description of the
front-line employee’s job attitudes and work characteristics to
build a model describing their association with the extent to
which the ideas of market orientation have taken hold at the
operational level, and their relationship with the employee’s
motivation and subsequent performance. The results show
that both internal and external characteristics are associated
with front-line employee ECMS, which itself is very strongly
related to desirable job outcomes.
6. Limitations and future research directions
While the results from this research strongly support the
proposed model and have contributed to our understanding of
Table III LISREL results for the hypothesized model
Hypothesis Hypothesis path Completely standardized estimate t-value Result
H1 Role ambiguity ¡ external customer mind-set Ϫ0.13 Ϫ2.26 Supported
H2 Role conflict ¡ external customer mind-set Ϫ0.20 Ϫ4.14 Supported
H3 Job satisfaction ¡ external customer mind-set 0.16 2.46 Supported
H4 Job autonomy ¡ external customer mind-set 0.11 2.02 Supported
H5 Customer ambiguity ¡ external customer mind-set Ϫ0.55 Ϫ9.55 Supported
H6 External customer mind-set ¡ work motivation 0.72 13.61 Supported
H7 External customer mind-set ¡ job performance 0.53 7.98 Supported
H8 Work motivation ¡ job performance 0.27 4.22 Supported
Volume 29 · Number 1 · 2015 · 38–48
45

the nature and form of the relations among characteristics of
the operational-level employee’s work environment, job
attitudes and performance, its limitations must also be
acknowledged. First, as the data is cross-sectional and neither
longitudinal or experimental, strictly causal relations cannot
be inferred from these results. Second, the sample primarily
consists of younger females with less work experience and who
are employed at smaller organizations. While this sample
matches those of many other studies of front-line employees,
it is entirely possible that the results would have been different
had the sample contained a greater number of male
respondents, older workers, those with more experience and/
or those working for larger firms. Therefore, future research
should further test these relations in different samples to
increase the robustness of the results. Third, the set of
antecedent variables used in this study is not exhaustive and so
other important antecedents should also be considered. In
particular, the role of constructs that are significantly under
managerial control, either through employee selection or
training, could provide additional insights into the role of
ECMS among employees (e.g. job feedback, task variety,
degree of formalization, IMO, etc.).
Fourth, additional control variables that have been found to
account for salesperson job performance should be included in
future research on the role of ECMS and service employee
sales performance to better isolate the role that ECMS plays.
For example, Verbeke et al. (2011) found that selling-related
knowledge, adaptiveness, cognitive attitude and level of work
engagement all play an important role in explaining sales
performance and future research, should include one or more
of these traits. In addition, future research should also
consider the types of service setting (e.g. transactional vs
relational) and type of product(s) being sold (e.g. hedonic vs
utilitarian) to uncover potential differences in the role that
employee attitudes towards serving customers has on job
outcomes. Finally, future studies that wish to better explain
service employee sales performance should attempt to use an
objective measure of sales performance (e.g. percentage of
assigned objectives met, managerial ranking, etc.), so as to
avoid the potential for bias in self-reported performance
measures.
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About the authors
Rajesh Iyer (PhD, Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale) is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Bradley
University. He has published in journals including Journal of
Advertising Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal
of Business Ethics, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Journal of
Marketing Theory and Practice and Marketing Management
Journal among others. His research interests include Services
Marketing, Health Care Marketing and Scales Research.
Rajesh Iyer is the corresponding author and can be contacted
at: riyer@bradley.edu
Mark C. Johlke (PhD, Texas Tech University) is an
Associate Professor of Marketing at Bradley University. He
serves as Director of the Bradley University Professional Sales
Program and currently as President of the University Sales
Center Alliance. His research has appeared in the Journal of
Personal Selling and Sales Management, Journal of Management,
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the Journal of
Service Research, among others.
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