An attitude-behavior model of salespeople's customer orientation

The goal of this article is to provide deeper insights into the construct of customer orientation at the individual level. The article has three main objectives: First, this study provides a two-dimensional conceptualization of customer orientation that distinguishes between attitudes and behaviors. Second, it explores direct and indirect effects of customer-oriented attitudes on customer satisfaction. Third, the authors propose and examine a positive moderating effect of empathy, reliability, and expertise on the link between customer-oriented attitude and customeroriented behavior and a negative moderating effect of salespeople's restriction in job autonomy. The analysis is based on dyadic data that involve judgments provided by salespeople and their customers across multiple manufacturing and services industries in a business-to-business context. Results support the authors' two-dimensional conceptualization of customer orientation. The authors also find that customer-oriented attitudes have a direct effect on customer satisfaction. The four proposed moderating effects are also in evidence.