An attitude-behavior model of salespeople’s customer orientation

The goal of this article is to provide deeper insights into the construct of customer orientation at the individual level. The article has three main objectives: First, this study provides a two-dimensional conceptualization of customer orientation that distinguishes between attitudes and behaviors. Second, it explores direct and indirect effects of customer-oriented attitudes on customer satisfaction. Third, the authors propose and examine a positive moderating effect of empathy, reliability, and expertise on the link between customer-oriented attitude and customer-oriented behavior and a negative moderating effect of salespeople’s restriction in job autonomy. The analysis is based on dyadic data that involve judgments provided by salespeople and their customers across multiple manufacturing and services industries in a business-to-business context. Results support the authors’ two-dimensional conceptualization of customer orientation. The authors also find that customer-oriented attitudes have a direct effect on customer satisfaction. The four proposed moderating effects are also in evidence. Ruth Maria Stock (ruth.stock@gmx.net) is a professor of business administration and management at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany. She holds a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Hagen, Germany, a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Mannheim, Germany, and a ha-bilitation degree from the University der Bundeswehr in Hamburg, Germany. She has published in various forums including theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Psychology & Marketing, and theJournal of Business-to-Business Marketing. Her main research areas include market-oriented management and business-to-business marketing. Wayne D. Hoyer (wayne.hoyer@mccombs.utexas.edu) is the James L. Bayless/William S. Farish Fund Chair for Free Enterprise, the chair of the Department of Marketing, and the director of the Center for Customer Insight in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D., M.S., and B.A. from Purdue University in the area of consumer psychology. He has published more than 60 articles in various forums including theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Advertising Research, and theJournal of Retailing. His research interests include customer insight and relationship management, consumer information processing and decision making (especially low-involvement decision making), and advertising effects (most particularly, miscomprehension and the impact of humor).