Explaining why employee‐customer orientation influences customers' perceptions of the service encounter

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine why employee‐level customer orientation (CO) influences the customer experience in a service setting. Design/methodology/approach – Given the dyadic nature of the study, a two‐way sample design was used which integrated employee responses with customer responses. A total of 186 employees and 1,117 customers participated in the study. The data was aggregated at the employee level of analysis. Findings – The study found that job satisfaction and employee commitment mediated the relationship between employee‐level CO and a customer's perception of interaction quality. Additionally, interaction quality is shown to be positively related to customer satisfaction. Research limitations/implications – Although the design of the research utilized data from both customers and employees from several restaurant outlets in the USA, all the restaurants belonged to one chain (reflecting a single corporate culture), and thus it may be difficult to generalize the results. Originality/value – This study extends the CO theory by explaining how and why CO affects a customer's perceptions from an organizational behavior (OB) perspective, with job satisfaction and organizational commitment as mediators. This is important as the few studies that attempted to explain the effect of CO on customers' experience through mediating variables took a marketing perspective instead of an OB view. Practically, this research highlights the important role that human resource management may have from the interactive marketing perspective.