ServiceFriday: Which Leaders Affect Customer Orientation Most? Depends on the Team

Leaders of firms that strive to provide superior customer service build customer orientation (CO) into their culture. Customer orientation is an attribute of individual employees in these firms, but many companies are now organizing service through teams. Creating consensus around customer orientation among the individuals on a team is a new element of the leaders’ culture mission. An article published in the Journal of Service Research looks at customer orientation in this team context and finds that the most effective leader in nurturing customer orientation may or may not be senior managers, depending on the employees involved.

The study looks at two types of leaders: direct supervisors—the leaders internal to teams, and senior managers—formal leaders external to teams. According to the paper: “Direct supervisors share the daily reality of teams and can directly reward or sanction team member behaviors, while senior managers are in charge of setting higher order goals and priorities. Some scholars have proposed a ‘cascading’ model in which senior managers rely on direct supervisors to disseminate CO.”

Further, the study distinguishes between frontstage teams, who have direct contact with customers, and backstage teams, who have less or none. “Understanding which organizational leader can effectively align teams with different levels of customer contact is critical for ensuring a high and consistent CO in service firms,” the authors write.

Building on the theory of construal fit—a social psychology construct explaining that things experienced up close are more detailed than things experienced from a distance—researchers uncovered differences in customer orientation between managers and teams depending on customer contact. They discovered that the customer orientation signals from the senior manager have a bigger impact on the customer orientation consensus among backstage teams, who are at a distance from customers. But, among the frontstage teams, who are in constant close contact with customers, direct supervisors have a bigger impact on customer orientation.  

Advice for leaders

The researchers counsel senior leaders to adjust their CO messaging depending on the team. For backstage teams, the bypass effect whereby the senior manager can communicate over the direct manager, gives senior managers powerful opportunities to affect the customer orientation consensus. Senior leaders can take a lesser role for frontstage teams, where the direct leader has a strong voice due to proximity to the customer.

But with companies moving toward service models that reduce direct customer contact, deft leaders will have to adjust. “Our results suggest that because of the declining customer contact, the importance of senior managers as role models of CO for employees will further grow. Taken together, these insights help firms appoint the correct leader to make CO diffusion more efficient and effective for both leaders and teams.”

Read the full article in the Journal of Service Research, found in Sage Journals at this link: https://bit.ly/2ws1z0r