Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Orientation, and the Job Performance of Frontline Employees

Article Citation:
Daniel Korschun, C.B. Bhattacharya, and Scott D. Swain (2014) Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Orientation, and the Job Performance of Frontline Employees. Journal of Marketing: May 2014, Vol. 78, No. 3, pp. 20-37.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1509/jm.11.0245

Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Orientation, and the Job Performance of Frontline Employees

Daniel Korschun, C.B. Bhattacharya, & Scott D. Swain
This study examines frontline employee responses to corporate social responsibility (CSR) using a multisourced data set at a Global 500 financial services company.
The authors find that frontline employees identify with the organization (i.e., organizational identification) and with customers (i.e., employee–customer identification) as a function of how much the employees perceive management and customers (respectively) to support the company's CSR activities. However, these respective effects are stronger among employees for whom CSR is already tied to their sense of self (i.e., CSR importance to the employee). In addition, both organizational identification and employee–customer identification are related to supervisor-rated job performance; however, only the effect of employee–customer identification is mediated by customer orientation, suggesting that these two targets of identification manifest through distinct mechanisms. The research empirically addresses the open questions of whether and when CSR can yield observable changes in employee behavior and alerts researchers to a novel target of identification for frontline employees.


Daniel Korschun is Assistant Professor of Marketing, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University (e-mail: ).

C.B. Bhattacharya is Full Professor, E.ON Chair in Corporate Responsibility, and Dean of International Relations, ESMT European School of Management and Technology (e-mail: ).

Scott D. Swain is Assistant Professor of Marketing, College of Business and Behavioral Science, Clemson University (e-mail: ).

The authors thank Tom J. Brown, Michael J. Dorsch, and Sankar Sen for their insightful comments; Anubhav Aggarwal and Jorge Fresneda for their research assistance; and AEGON N.V. and its subsidiary TransAmerica for their cooperation in carrying out this research. Robert Palmatier served as area editor for this article.

0 komentar:



Posting Komentar