How and When Does Customer Orientation Influence Frontline Employee Job Outcomes? A Meta-Analytic Evaluation
verifiedrich profile · Journal of Marketing · 2012
Zablah, Alex R.; Franke, George R.; Brown, Tom J.; Bartholomew, Darrell E.
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
customer orientation co → emotional exhaustion
customer orientation co → work engagement
customer orientation co → job satisfaction
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
customer orientation co predicts emotional exhaustion
customer orientation co predicts job satisfaction
customer orientation co predicts organizational commitment
customer orientation co predicts work engagement
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
Previous research has conceptualized and modeled customer orientation (CO) in one of two ways: as a psychological phenomenon antecedent to critical job states (i.e., stress and engagement) or as frontline employee behaviors that are caused by these same job states. Building on meta-analytic data, this study finds greater support for the causal relationships implied by a psychological construal of the construct and reveals that CO influences frontline employees' job outcomes through its effects on stress and engagement. Moderation analyses also indicate that CO's influence on model variables is stronger when frontline employees' customer workloads increase and is weaker as the need for customer persuasion increases. These findings contradict widely held assumptions rooted in a behavioral view of CO—namely, that CO is a consequence of job states, a proximate determinant of job outcomes, and most beneficial when ample opportunity for customer engagement exists. Overall, the results support a broadened perspective that recognizes that CO improves job outcomes because it enhances frontline employees' psychological welfare in addition to being good for business. These findings suggest that managers should consider CO an important criterion in frontline employee decisions, recognize CO as beneficial when limited opportunity for customer engagement exists, and avoid efforts to curtail CO's costs at the frontline employee level.
What the literature says about it
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Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
- 10.1080/02642069.2025.2454944
- 10.12783/dtem/iceme2017/11797
- 10.1080/09585192.2020.1837201
- 10.25159/2520-3223/4556
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.