Abstract
Reviews of the customer service literature demonstrates that employee’s customer orientation (CO) is critical for ensuring service quality. However, CO in teams, which are the unit of service, has been somewhat neglected. Accordingly, this study focuses on CO in service teams by examining the effect of team CO climate and team CO consensus on customer trust, service quality and the moderating effect of team exhaustion. Data were collected from matched 261 employees and 1020 customers nested in 87 service teams using a time-lagged research design. Using polynomial regression with response surface analysis, our study indicates the existence of the linear and non-linear impacts of team CO level and CO consensus on customer outcomes under conditions of (in)congruence. Moreover, team exhaustion is found to weaken the positive impact of congruence but enhance the negative impact of incongruence between team CO climate and CO consensus on customer outcomes. The findings send a clear message to managers that they need to align team’s overall CO climate and CO consensus as well as reducing team-level emotional exhaustion in order to achieve desirable customer outcomes.
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