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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...