Personal and organizational predictors of customer orientation and customer satisfaction: A study in health-care services sector

Service employees are acting as boundary spanners between organization and customer. Therefore, it is predicted that service employees' customer orientation leads to customer satisfaction. Moreover, service employees' customer orientation will be related to the service climate. Two key factors in the social system of organizations affect the service climate: the leader's customer orientation and employees' organizational commitment. Data were collected from general practitioners and therapists as well as their customers and team leaders. Data was matched from 681 customers to 166 employees and 30 team leaders to 116 employees. Results support the hypotheses that personal customer orientation of the service staff correlates with customer satisfaction, and that service climate is associated with personal customer orientation. The strongest effect occurred for personal customer orientation of team leaders. Service climate partially mediates the relationship between leaders' customer orientation and customer satisfaction and the relationship between commitment and customer satisfaction.