لخّصلي

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, 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 "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