Past studies show that the implementation of market orientation has a positive effect on the job attitudes of male-dominant Western managers and salespersons. This study extends the knowledge in this area by attempting to empirically establish if market orientation can be implemented to service employees across culture and gender. Results show that none of the behavioral components of market orientation has a positive impact on job satisfaction of Thai female customer contact service employees, and that only customer orientation and interfunctional coordination have marginal effects on role ambiguity and organizational commitment. Managerial implications, limitations, and future research directions are also discussed.
The service sector plays a more critical role in the growth of developing economies, and both multinational and local service firms are exploring ways in which they can improve their service quality to create customer satisfaction and loyalty. Heskett et al. (1994) and Schneider and Bowen (1995) contend that the job attitudes of customer contact service employees and customer satisfaction and loyalty are directly related, and that managing these attitudes is critical to the success of service firms. Since its emergence in the 1990s, market orientation has been widely accepted as a potent way to enhance the performance at the firm's level (Jaworski and Kohli, 1993 and Narver and Slater, 1990) as well as at the individual employee's level (Jaworski and Kohli, 1993, Selnes et al., 1996 and Siguaw et al., 1994). At the individual employee's level, it has been found that market orientation, as a single construct, reduces the role stress of employees while increasing their job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Jaworski and Kohli, 1993, Selnes et al., 1996 and Siguaw et al., 1994). These studies on the effect of market orientation on employees' job attitudes, however, used male-dominant Western subjects who were either managers (Jaworski and Kohli, 1993, Ruekert, 1992 and Selnes et al., 1996) or salespersons (Siguaw et al., 1994). Because of the cultural and gender-based differences, the positive effect of market orientation on job attitudes may not be realized in female-dominant, non-Western customer contact service employees.
The objective of this study is to extend the knowledge by attempting to establish, empirically, if the behavioral components of market orientation (Narver and Slater, 1990) have a positive impact on the job attitudes (i.e., role ambiguity, role conflict, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment) of the female customer contact service employees of banks in a non-Western country (i.e., Thailand).
This study contributes to the literature in a couple of ways. First, this study provides additional evidence to verify the external validity of Narver and Slater's (1990) market orientation scale in non-Western countries, namely, Thailand. The scale was found to be both reliable and valid, and thus can be used for future research in non-Western countries. The findings also help to establish if each of the behavioral components of market orientation significantly influences the job attitudes of non-Western female customer contact service employees. It was found that none of the three behavioral components has a significant impact on the job satisfaction of the sampled employees at all. It was also found that only customer orientation and interfunctional coordination had a direct, marginally negative impact on role ambiguity, and that only customer orientation and interfunctional coordination had a direct, marginally positive impact on organizational commitment.Contrary to the general belief and the empirical findings among Western managers and salespeople, the findings of this study indicate that the adoption of market orientation—which means making each customer contact service employee understand and accept as his or her core value that the whole purpose of the organization is to continuously create superior value for customers—may not be an effective way to improve the job satisfaction of non-Western female customer contact service employees. The main benefit of the adoption of market orientation seems to be the marginal reduction in role ambiguity and the marginal improvement in organizational commitment from customer orientation and interfunctional coordination. Specifically, although customer orientation and interfunctional coordination has an indirect effect on job satisfaction through role ambiguity, their direct impact on role ambiguity is relatively small (R2 = 0.14). The direct impact of customer orientation and interfunctional coordination on organizational commitment is also relatively small (R2 of the reduced form equation = 0.18). If the objective of multinational service managers is to improve job attitudes especially job satisfaction of non-Western female customer contact service employees, other human resource management practices such as performance-based reward system ( Schneider and Bowen, 1995) and internal marketing ( Cahill, 1996) may be needed.
