The influence of service climate and job involvement on customer‐oriented organizational citizenship behavior in Greek service organizations: a survey
| Published date | 21 August 2007 |
| Date | 21 August 2007 |
| Pages | 469-491 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01425450710776290 |
| Author | Zoe S. Dimitriades |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
The influence of service climate
and job involvement on
customer-oriented organizational
citizenship behavior in Greek
service organizations: a survey
Zoe S. Dimitriades
University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness and to highlight the nature of
inter-relationship(s) between service climate and job involvement in impacting customer-focused
organizational citizenship behaviors of frontline employees in a diverse cultural context, at the
crossroads of East and West.
Design/methodology/approach – Building on organizational citizenship behavior literature, the
present study in the paper involved customer-contact personnel employed in five service industries in
a Greek mid-sized town. Questionnaires were administered in person by the researcher during
regularly scheduled meetings on company premises. A total of 269 individuals were invited to
participate in the study. Participation was voluntary. The response rate was 74 percent. Confirmatory
factor analysis (CFA), reliability-, correlation- path- and hierarchical regression analyses were
conducted to test research hypotheses.
Findings – The findings in this paper indicate that the concept of customer-oriented organizational
citizenship behavior (CO-OCB) is a useful construct in the Greek context. Both direct and indirect
influences and interactive effects were identified. Indeed, results indicate that the relationship between
job involvement and service climate in impacting CO-OCBs is complex (moderated mediation or
mediated moderation?), warranting further investigation.
Research limitations/implications – The findings in the paper are limited by the sampling
method and the specificity of the geographic context. It would be of interest to enhance the theoretical
model by incorporating more individual, task, organizational and contextual variables.
Practical implications – The study in this paper demonstrates the important effects of service
climate and job involvement on frontline employees’ customer-oriented organizational citizenship
behaviors in Greek service organizations. Service managers should benefit from noting the links and
the likely favorable outcomes for customers, employees and their organizations.
Originality/value – The paper provides empirical evidence of the applicability of the CO-OCB
construct in Greek service contexts and illuminates the complex nature of inter-relationships between
organizational climate for service and job involvement in predicting customer-oriented organizational
citizenship behaviors, expanding the OCB literature.
Keywords Organizationalbehaviour, Customer orientation,Service climate, Greece, Serviceindustries
Paper type Research paper
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
Hearty thanks are conveyed to the Editor, ProfessorJohn Gennard, and the anonymous reviewers
for their most helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. The
assistance of Dr George Menexes with Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and the kind
cooperation of Miss Suzanne McCormack, journal secretary, are gratefully acknowledged.
The influence of
service climate
469
Received August 2006
Revised January 2007
Accepted January 2007
Employee Relations
Vol. 29 No. 5, 2007
pp. 469-491
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/01425450710776290
Introduction
Over the last 40 years customer orientation (CO) has emerged as a cornerstone of the
theory and practice of services management (Brady and Cronin, 2001). Customer
orientation has been defined as the satisfaction of customer needs at the level of the
employee-customer interaction (Saxe and Weitz, 1982). Customer-oriented behaviors
demonstrated by frontline personnel have been conceptualized as the employees’
willingness to: assist customers make satisfactory purchase decisions; help customers
assess their needs; offer services that will satisfy those needs; describe services
accurately; and avoid the use of deceptive, manipulative or high-pressure influence
tactics (Hoffman and Ingham, 1992, p. 69).
Customer orientation is important because service employees who exhibit a high
degree of CO engage in behaviors that increase the satisfaction of their customers
(Dunlap et al., 1988). Kelley (1992) further asserts that customer-oriented behaviors lead
to the development of long-term relationships between the organization and its
customers that are beneficial to both parties. As a result, customer-oriented firms tend
to enjoy better performance (measured in terms of profitability or service quality) than
do firms employing other orientations (Hartline et al., 2000).
While customer orientation is important for all firms, it is especially important for
firms in the service sector (Hartline et al., 2000; Kelley, 1992). It is so because in service
firms the employees who make direct contact with the customer represent the
organization and “produce” the service (Zeithaml and Bitner, 1996). Moreover, due to
the intangibility, heterogeneity and inseparability of services customer-contact
employees’ attitudes and behaviors influence the consumer satisfaction and service
quality (Barroso et al., 2004; Bowen and Schneider, 1985; Dean, 2004; Hartline and
Ferrell, 1996). Specifically, Morrison (1996) and Bienstock et al. (2003) indicate that
customer-contact personnel discretional behaviors not formally prescribed by the
organization – organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) – influence the quality of
service delivered to the consumer. Thus OCB is of particular interest to service
managers in order to stimulate this type of behavior, enhancing favorable
organizational outcomes.
In their seminal work “Organizational citizenship behaviors: a critical revie w of the
theoretical and empirical literature and suggestions for future research”, Podsakof f
et al. (2000) raise a number of critical issues. First, the definition and nature of OCB
(Organ, 1988) often is not differentiated conceptually from related concepts such as
extra-role behavior (Van Dyne et al., 1994); prosocial organizational behaviors (Brief
and Motowildo, 1986); and organizational spontaneity (George and Brief, 1992.
However although “there are some important differences between these constructs ...
it is not uncommon to see these difference glossed over, if not completely ignored. The
danger in not recognizing the differences in these constructs is that the same construct
may have conflicting conceptual connotations for different people. On the other hand,
the literature also indicates that there are a number of occasions where essentially the
same idea or concept has been given different labels by different researchers. The
problem with this practice is that it becomes difficult to see the overall patterns that
exist in the research literature” (p. 514).
Second, a lack of consensus exists regarding the dimensionality of the construct.
Indeed, Podsakoff et al. (2000) identified “almost 30 potentially different forms of
citizenship behavior”, organizing them into seven common themes or dimensions:
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