Introduction
It has been widely noted in prior literature that customer-oriented behaviour (or customer orientation) creates greater long-term performance benefits for the company relative to sales-oriented selling (or sales orientation) (Thakor & Joshi, 2005). Prior research proposes that customer-oriented behaviours lead to the development of long-term relationships between the organization and its customers that are valuable to both parties (Dimitriades, 2007). As a result, firms that show more customer-oriented behaviour have a tendency to have better performance results than firms employing other orientations (Dimitriades, 2007). Customer-oriented behaviours are usually described as behaviours such as discussing the customers' needs, helping customers to achieve their goals, and influencing customers by providing information rather than by asserting pressure (Stock & Hoyer, 2005). Reluctance of employees to engage in customer orientation drives from the fact that relative to sales orientation, customer orientation requires greater expenditure of effort by the employee in customer-related interactions (Thakor & Joshi, 2005). To stimulate customer-oriented behaviour, firms encourage direct customer contact, collect information from customers about their wishes, and use client information to design and deliver products and services (Lengnick-Hall, 1996).
While there exists a significant body of the prior literature on customer-orientated behaviour, there remain important gaps in the understanding of the factors that motivate customer orientation (Thakor & Joshi, 2005). Despite considerable evidence regarding the motivating tendency of jobs (Thakor & Joshi, 2005; Hackman and Oldham, 1980), the effects on customer-orientated behaviour have not been examined in prior literature. Given that jobs exist within organizational contexts, the behaviour within and evaluation of their job and of their organization have interrelated effects on employees’ motivation to engage in customer-orientated behaviour (Thakor & Joshi, 2005). In this research, the job characteristics model (JCM) (Hackman & Oldham, 1980) is used to address these limitations in prior research about customer-oriented behaviour. The job characteristics model is especially appropriate for the purposes of this study for two reasons: one, because it explicitly focuses on the motivating potential of jobs, and two, because it explicitly identifies the evaluations of the organization context of the relationship between the employees’ evaluation of their job, thereby establishing the structure of the interrelationships among these motivational drivers (Thakor & Joshi, 2005).
This study proposes that meaning of work plays an import role in the relation between different job charcateristics and customer-oriented behaviour. Specifically, this paper expects that the experience of meaning of work, through a feeling of significance and motivation, creates higher customer-oriented behaviour. The job characteristics model argues that the motivation to work is a function of three critical psychological states—experienced meaningfulness of the work (or experienced meaningfulness), experienced responsibility for outcomes of the work, and knowledge of the actual results of the work activities. Empirical testing of the full model has shown that experienced meaningfulness is the key mediator of all the five core job characteristics on motivation (Thakor & Joshi, 2005), thereby making it an especially salient driver of motivation. This study focusses on two aspects of the job; task significance and servant leadership to examine their influence on customer-oriented behaviour through meaningfulness of work.. Furthermore, to provide a more clear and comprehensive picture of the possible influences on customer orientation through meaningfulness of work, organizational factors are also included in the model. Research has shown that both organizational identity and organizational climate influence the customer-oriented behaviour through meaningfulness of work (Thakor & Joshi, 2005; May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004). Finally, the moderating role of two other job characteristics, job autonomy and formal rules, within the relationships with customer-oriented behaviour, will be researched. In particular, this study focuses on answering the question: What is the role of meaning of work in the relation between organization and job aspects and customer-oriented behaviour?
This study contributes to the meaningful work literature in several ways. First of all, this study calls to empirically investigate what influences the relationship of meaningful work and individual outcomes, or more specifically what mechanisms explain the relationship between different individual and organizational aspects, experienced meaningfulness of work, and customer-oriented behaviour. From a academic perspective, this study can contribute to an better understanding of the antecedents of customer-orientated behaviour within a service firm. Because service firms are very client or customer oriented, understanding the possible antecedents provide valuable insights. Second, this research investigates the relationship between meaningful work and customer-oriented behaviour, a relationship not often studied in the past (Thakor & Joshi, 2005). While previous research has identified numerous drivers of customer-orientated behaviour, such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Stock & Hoyer, 2005), the potential role of experienced meaningfulness by the employee has not been systematically researched. By studying this relationship, new information is provided about the influence of meaning of work on important aspects for the business world. Third, by not only looking at the relationship between meaning of work and employee work outcomes but by looking at a very broad model, this study contributes by drawing the big picture taking many organizational factors into account that can influence meaning of work and the relationship between meaning of work and customer-oriented behaviour.
This paper will proceed as follows. First, it will review the meaningful work, customer-oriented behaviour, job characteristics, servant leadership and organizational factors, literature. Based on these theories, the hypotheses will be addressed, proposing that employees’ meaning of work mediates the relationship between job and organizational aspects and customer-oriented behaviour, with a moderating role of job autonomy and formal rules. Next, the paper will explain the methods we used to test our hypotheses among our sample of employees working at the Amsterdam office of a large American consultancy firm. Finally, the collected data will be summarized in the results section, after which an interpretation and discussion of the results will be made.
Theory and Hypotheses
Meaningfulness of work and Customer-Oriented Behaviour
The majority of us work to support ourselves or our family, making work a necessity (Wrzesniewski, 2003). However, many people want their careers and their work to be more than simply a way to earn a paycheck or pass their time; they want their work to mean something (Steger, Dick & Duffy, 2012). Work may be one of the most important domains in life from which to extract meaning, given the amount of time that most adults spend working. In addition, evidence has been brought forward to suggest that money is losing its power as a central motivator, partially due to the general population realising that above a minimum level necessary for survival, money adds little to their subjective well-being (Thakor & Joshi, 2005; Seligman, 2002).
Meaningfulness of work refers to people’s judgments that their work is significant, worthwhile, and has positive meaning (Steger, Littman-Ovadia, Miller, Menger, & Rothmann, 2013). How Wrzesniewski (2003) explains it; ‘experiencing your work as meaningful is a subjective kind of ‘sense’ that people make of their work’. People strive to fulfil needs of purpose, values, efficacy and self-worth in their work (Wrzesniewski, 2003). Meaningful work occurs when people can really apply themselves to significant work activities that serve a valued, broader purpose (Steger et al., 2013). Experienced meaningfulness denotes personally perceived significance (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013; DeShon & Gillespie, 2005) and is unique to the person and their interpretation of a context, not to the overt or objective significance of an event (i.e., what is interpreted as meaningful to one person could not be interpreted as meaningful to another).
The psychological condition of experienced meaningfulness has been recognized by researchers as an important psychological state or condition at work (May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004). Although a case can be made that organizations may have an ethical or moral obligation to help workers experience meaningfulness in their work, a more tangible reason why meaningfulness work matters is its consistent association with benefits to workers and organizations (Steger, Dick & Duffy, 2012). People who experience their work as meaningful report greater well-being and greater job satisfaction (Steger, Dick & Duffy, 2012).
Salespeople will be motivated to expend the additional effort that is required by customer-oriented selling if they believe that they will experience a feeling of accomplishment from this activity (Thakor & Joshi, 2005). In order to develop this belief, salespeople have to perceive customer-oriented selling as being an important activity (Hall, 1976). Employees rarely place energy into a context that they find little meaning in or where they believe their efforts will ultimately result in a fruitless, empty endeavour (Shuck & Rose, 2013). Experienced meaningfulness enhances the activity importance by making the work ‘‘count’’ in the salesperson’s ‘‘own system of values’’ (Hackman and Oldham, 1980, p. 73). Thus, by fostering the perception of activity importance, experienced meaningfulness generates employees’ belief that they will experience a feeling of accomplishment from having successfully engaged in customer-oriented selling. Consistent with this argument, Oldham (1996) suggested that experienced meaningfulness may serve as the strongest mediator between work characteristics and work outcomes.
Hypothesis 1. Employees’ experienced meaningfulness will be positively related to customer-oriented behaviour.
Task significance and Meaningfulness of work
One facet of measuring meaningfulness of work is a straightforward reflection of the idea of psychological meaningfulness that has been part of work psychology since the job characteristics model (Steger, Dick & Duffy, 2012). Meaningfulness of work is often a subjective experience that what one is doing has personal significance. This means that research suggests that job significance is of great influence on the experience of people to judge their work to matter and be meaningful. Jobs that provide greater task significance (work outcomes having a substantial impact on others) are more motivating (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013). Theory reveals that the task characteristics of the job interact dynamically with the purposeful work strivings (that emanate from one’s personality traits) by providing the context in which the individual interprets the significance or worthiness of work (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013).
Task significance, brought by Hackman and Oldham (1976), entails how much a job sufficiently impacts others either in the organization (supervisors, subordinates, co-workers) or beyond the organization, including customers or even society as a whole. Task significance allows for a deeper sense of meaning in one’s work in that it elucidates a fairly clear link to how the employee affects others. Through this, task significance provides perceptions that their job has importance. When an individual understands that the results of his work may have a significant effect on the well-being of other people, the meaningfulness of that work usually is enhanced (Hackman & Oldham, 1976). Hackman and Oldham showed in their study that task significance was one of the predictors for experiences meaningfulness. This leads to the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2. Employees’ meaningful work will mediate the relationship between employees’ task significance and customer-oriented behaviour.
Servant leadership and Meaningfulness of work
Currently, there is a renewed interest in the role of leadership in helping individuals experience their work as meaningful and meaning making in work events (Harrison, 2008). Leaders play an essential role in shaping meaningful working conditions (van Dierendonck & Sousa, 2016). Employees want to feel that they are part of something larger, that their work matters and that organizational leadership encourages their personal growth, shows respect, and offers interrelatedness and trust (van Dierendonck & Sousa, 2016). Van Dierendonck and Sousa (2016) suggest that servant leaders affect engagement because they are able to create the conditions for employees to find meaning in their work.
In the 1970s, Greenleaf laid down the base for servant leadership theory (Greenleaf, 1977). He reasoned that “the great leader is seen as servant first, and that simple fact is the key to his greatness” (1977, p. 21). Servant leadership is not focused on fulfilling leaders’ personal needs but is focused on prioritizing the fulfilment of followers’ needs (Greenleaf, 1970). Servant leadership refers to the leader’s focus on “developing employees to their fullest potential in the areas of task effectiveness, community stewardship, self-motivation, and future leadership capabilities” (Liden, Wayne, Zhao, & Henderson, 2008, p. 162).
For Greenleaf (1977, p. 142), work meaningfulness was a central piece in the whole notion of servant leadership: “The work exists for the person as much as the person exists for the work. Put another way, the business exists to provide meaningful work to the person as it exists to provide a product or service to the customer.” People-centered leadership has gained even more momentum with evidence showing that companies with leaders who empower people, have more satisfied, more committed, better performing employees (Liden, Wayne, & Sparrowe, 2000). Moreover, a servant leader provides purpose, makes work meaningful, and builds on the strengths of followers (van Dierendonck, 2011).
Hypothesis 3. Employees’ meaningful work will mediate the relationship between employees’ servant leadership and customer-oriented behaviour.
Organizational Climate and Meaningfulness of work
Central to most, if not all, models of organizational behaviour are perceptions of the work environment, referred to generally as ‘organizational climate’ (Rousseau, 1990). Organizational climate can be defined as “a set of perceived attributes of an organization and its subsystems as reflected in the way an organization deals with its members, groups and issues” (Suresh & Venkatammal, 2010). Warm organizational climate is characterized by warm, stable, and open relationships between co-workers (Suresh & Venkatammal, 2010). Work situations that are characterized by social support and interdependence among co-workers provide a setting in which agreeable and emotionally stable individuals can successfully fulfil their communion goals (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013).
Throughout these empirical efforts, there have been continual attempts to identify the key components of climate. In an early review of climate, Campbell and his colleagues (1970) summarized the existing literature and contended that there were four major climate dimensions—individual autonomy, the degrees of structure imposed on the position, reward orientation, and consideration, warmth, and support. Schnake (1983) examined five dimensions of climate—reward orientation, structure, warmth and support, standards, and responsibility. He found that all five dimensions were positively related to each measure of job satisfaction (intrinsic, extrinsic, and social) measured in the study.
Specifically, organizational climate is the overall meaning derived from the aggregation of individual perceptions of a work environment (i.e., the typical or average way people in an organization ascribe meaning to that (James et al., 2008). Perceptions of the general organizational climate develop as individuals attribute meaning to their organizational context based on the significance of the environment for individual values (James et al., 2008). A variety of studies suggest that positive interrelating contributes to flourishing or strength-building by fortifying people physiologically, fostering greater collective mindfulness, generating greater energy, allowing more efficient and effective coordination), and in general, fostering trust which enables the favourable resource flows and exchanges that build economic, financial, reputational, human, and social capital (James et al., 2008).
Mercer and Bilson (1985) reported a positive relationship between supportive organizational climate and employee outcomes such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction. When individuals are treated with dignity, respect and value for their contributions, and not simply as the occupant of a role, they are likely to obtain a sense of meaningfulness from their interactions, to the extent that co-worker interactions foster a sense of belonging, and a stronger sense of meaning should emerge (May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004). Qualitative quantitative research seems to support a relation between rewarding co-worker interactions and meaningfulness (May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004). Thus, individuals who perceive the organizational climate as warm and friendly should experience greater meaning in their work (May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004).
Hypothesis 4. Employees’ meaningful work will mediate the relationship between employees’ experience of a warm organizational climate and customer-oriented behaviour.
Organizational Identification and Meaningfulness of work
Glimmers of the construct now known as organizational identification (OI) appear very early in the development of organizational science (Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008). OI has been described as the “coalescence” between the individual and the organization that generates a sense of individual conviction and a willingness to devote increased effort to the organization (Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008). Ashforth, Harrison and Corley (2008) see identity and identification as “root constructs” in organizational studies, in the way that every entity needs to have a sense of who or what it is, who or what other entities are, and how the entities are associated.
Identification matters because it is the process by which people come to define themselves, communicate that definition to others, and use that definition to navigate their lives, work-wise or other (Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008). Identity is a self-referential description that provides contextually appropriate answers to the question “Who am I?” or “Who are we?” (Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008). Moreover, identity theory (an overarching term for structural identity theory and identity control theory) holds that identity is those “parts of a self-composed of the meanings that persons attach to the multiple roles they typically play in highly differentiated contemporary societies” (Stryker & Burke, 2000: 284). In order to achieve the stage of “identification,” two components are necessary, and one is frequently associated with them. The two necessary components are: a cognitive one, in the sense of awareness of membership; and an evaluative one, in the sense that this awareness is related to some value connotations. The third component consists of an emotional investment in the awareness and evaluations (Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008).
Research has begun to provide more insights into the relationships between identification and the meaningfulness of work (Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008). Rousseau (1990) captured the essence of this relationship in her discussion of how deep structure identification helps employees overcome the forces acting against organizational attachment in today’s workplace. Furthermore, Ashforth, Harrison, and Corley (2008) suggested a relationships between the meaning employees find in their work and identification with various loci within an organization. Therefore, it is expected in this research that identification with the organization has a positive effect with meaningfulness at work, which leads to the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 5. Employees’ meaningful work will mediate the relationship between employees’ organizational identification and customer-oriented behaviour.
Formal rules as moderator
Service firms need written policies and procedures to facilitate smooth execution of their operations and to maintain consistency (Parasuraman, 1987). However, a service firm must be willing to tolerate, and perhaps even encourage, a certain degree of departure from written policies at the individual customer-employee transaction level, if such departure is deemed necessary for ensuring customer satisfaction. Such flexibility is especially important, and can reap handsome benefits for the firm, during the process of handling non-routine transactions (Parasuraman, 1987).
Not to imply that service firms should satisfy their customers at all costs. Obviously, such an extreme posture would be equivalent to courting financial ruin. Rather, the implication is that sticking to the other extreme that is, going by the "rule book" come what may would be equally disastrous in the long run. Organizations that permit a reasonable degree of flexibility at the customer transaction level, and provides commensurate authority to customer-contact personnel to use their judgment in dealing with legitimate customer concerns (whether explicit or implicit), will be ahead of its competitors who stick to their rule books (Parasuraman, 1987).
Hypothesis 6. Organizational formal rules moderate the relationship between employees’ meaningful work and their customer-oriented behavior, in such a way that the relationship is stronger when there are less rules.
Autonomy as moderator
More recently, fulfilment, autonomy, satisfaction, engagement, working relations and learning have been identified as important in a meaningful job (Geldenhuys, Laba, & Venter, 2014). Numerous studies have shown that differences in characteristics of the work situation, such as the redesign of work through job enrichment (e.g., Hackman & Oldham, 1976) play an important role in impacting employee motivation and behaviour at work.
One important characteristic of a job to be meaningful is autonomy. Autonomy in the job refers to the extent to which a job allows freedom, independence, and discretion to schedule work, make decisions, and choose the methods used to perform tasks (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013). Thus, a job with high autonomy allows individuals to engage in divergent and creative mental activities (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013). They have greater freedom to explore and experiment with alternative methods at work and to satisfy their curious nature. When the work situation has high autonomy, open individuals who are striving for autonomy find the situation highly meaningful (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013).
Hypothesis 7. Employees’ autonomy experience moderates the relationship between employees’ meaningful work and their customer-oriented behaviour, in such a way that the relationship is stronger when there is more autonomy.