Over the past two decades, both academics and practitioners have become convinced of the importance of developing a customer-oriented work climate and delivering high quality service to customers. Many scholars have even asserted a “spillover” effect between employee attitudes such as workplace fairness perceptions and customer satisfaction. However, little is known about how employee attitudes translate into the development and implementation of service quality on the frontline of service organizations.

Which employee attitudes are significantly related to distinct dimensions of customer-oriented behaviors among frontline service employees? Are some employee attitudes more proximal than others in motivating customer-oriented behaviors among frontline service employees? Are there dimensions among employee attitudes such as workplace fairness that may be more strongly related to customer-oriented behaviors among frontline service employees? Are distinctions among dimensions of customer-oriented behaviors relevant for understanding how strongly different employee attitudes are related to them?

In this paper, results of an empirical study are presented that begin to address these important questions. Specifically, we develop a theoretical model concerning the differential and mediated effects of three distinct dimensions of organizational justice (fairness) on three distinct dimensions of customer-oriented boundary-spanning behaviors (COBSBs) suggested by prior research. We then present the results of an empirical survey-based field study with a sample of 281 customer service employees from an entire region of a national bank designed to test our proposed model and hypotheses.

Drawing from prior research, we investigate three types of behaviors that frontline service employees may perform that are associated with linking the organization to its potential or actual customers: (1) external representation, being vocal advocates to outsiders of the organization’s image, goods, and services, (2) internal influence, taking individual initiative in communications to the firm and co-workers to improve service delivery by the organization, co-workers, and oneself, and (3) service delivery, serving customers in a conscientious, responsive, flexible, and courteous manner.

We also consider three dimensions of organizational justice and draw from social exchange theory to propose a differential pattern of relationships from individual justice dimensions to COBSBs via job satisfaction and/or organizational commitment. The justice dimensions are: (1) procedural justice, the perceived fairness of the formal decision-making procedures used in an organization, (2) interactional justice, the perceived fairness of interpersonal treatment by managers in making decisions that impact the employee, and (3) distributive justice, the perceived fairness of outcomes or rewards that an employee receives from the firm.

The results offer guidance to retail executives who desire to foster the development and implementation of a customer orientation on the frontline of the organization. First, the results reveal the central importance of developing social exchange relationships with frontline service employees in nurturing such an orientation among customer service employees. Organizational commitment was a direct positive antecedent of both external representation and internal influence behaviors among service employees, and job satisfaction was indirectly related via commitment. Further, these two constructs fully mediated the effects of the organizational justice dimensions on external representation and internal influence behaviors, indicating that any efforts taken by retail executives to improve the workplace climate will have a spillover effect on customers via COBSBs. Among the justice dimensions, however, it is also clear that procedural justice issues are more important in developing a social exchange environment that encourages COBSBs than are distributive justice issues inasmuch as the indirect paths from procedural justice to external representation and internal influence behaviors were significantly larger than the indirect paths from distributive justice to these behaviors.

It is also important to note that the results suggest that social exchange relationships between service employees and the organization are especially important for motivating the more discretionary forms of COBSBs – behaviors such as advocacy of the organization as a place to do business (external representation) and individual initiative to identify solutions to pressing service delivery problems (internal influence). While a control-oriented management approach may be workable in mandating role-prescribed service delivery behaviors, there are limitations to this approach in encouraging the broader range of customer-oriented behaviors that support a customer-oriented climate. Even in tightly controlled service contexts, service employees possess considerable discretion in terms of the customer-oriented behaviors they choose to provide or withhold, and these behaviors rely on a social exchange relationship.

Second, the results point to the critical role of fair interpersonal treatment from immediate managers in developing a work climate that motivates exceptional service delivery behaviors. Although job satisfaction and organizational commitment were positively related to both external representation and internal influence COBSBs, only interactional justice was uniquely related to service delivery behaviors. Service employees appear to consider the legitimacy of implicit or explicit requests to deliver exceptional service based on a consideration of the fairness of interpersonal treatment by immediate managers in interactions with themselves..