Motivating salesperson customer orientation: insights from the job characteristics model

Relative to sales orientation, customer orientation requires greater expenditure of effort by the salesperson in customer-related interactions. Consequently, salespeople have to be motivated to engage in this mode of selling. In this research, we draw from the job characteristics model (JCM) to argue that (i) salesperson motivation to engage in customer orientation will be impacted by the extent to which they experience their work as meaningful and that (ii) this impact will be moderated by their affective evaluations of two aspects of their work context: their identification with the values of their organization and their satisfaction with the pay they receive. Research results from a survey of 281 salespeople show that experienced meaningfulness has a positive main effect on customer orientation and that both organizational identification and pay satisfaction enhance this positive main effect. Theoretical, managerial, and future research implications arising from the research results are discussed.