The service-oriented citizenship performance of customer-contact employees

Contact employees are critical resources for the development and implementation of service quality and strong customer relationships. Service marketing research suggests three instrumental roles of contact employees including (a) representing the organization favorably to outsiders, (b) providing service to customers, and (c) serving as information gatherers concerning customer needs and service improvement possibilities. These three roles correspond to three types of citizenship responsibilities of contact employees. While antecedents of citizenship behaviors have been investigated extensively in organizational behavior, the citizenship behaviors of contact employees have received only limited consideration. Similarly, only a few studies have investigated antecedents of the service behaviors of contact employees.; A field investigation with a major retail bank was conducted to understand the antecedents and consequences of customer-contact employee service-oriented citizenship performance. Customer-contact employees and their managers at 124 branches responded to the citizenship performance measures. Antecedent measures gathered from customer-contact employees included intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction, distributive, procedural and interactional fairness, participative leadership and centralization. Service quality and customer satisfaction data for each branch were also included in the study as potential consequences of service-oriented citizenship performance.; The results of the data analyses using structural equation modeling procedures revealed the important role of job satisfaction in partially mediating the relationships between the fairness antecedents, participative leadership and centralization and the three dimensions of service-oriented citizenship performance. Intrinsic job satisfaction was a positive predictor of each type of citizenship behavior. Extrinsic job satisfaction, however, had unexpected, negative relationships with two of the citizenship dimensions. All three of the fairness dimensions and participative leadership and centralization had indirect effects on service-oriented citizenship performance through the job satisfaction dimensions. In addition, interactional fairness and participative leadership had direct effects to some behaviors. Finally, the service-oriented citizenship behaviors were significantly related to the measure of branch service quality but not to customer satisfaction.; The study findings contribute to the understanding of the antecedents and consequences of customer-contact employee service-oriented citizenship behaviors. Managers should also find the results useful for developing and implementing service quality with customer-contact employees.