1 Internal Effects of Customer Contact within Service Organizations: Implications for Developing a Customer-oriented Organizational Culture

Abstract: This paper investigates how an organization can become customer oriented in terms of subculture formation originating from customer contact. Although existing market orientation research has assumed cultural homogeneity, this paper views organizational culture as a varying degree of shared cognition among its organizational members and focuses on individual employee’s customer orientation. Drawing from the literature on subculture formation, the study proposes that customer contact is a significant source of subculture formation with respect to customer orientation and tests a model that assumes customer contact exerts a positive influence on customer orientation, which subsequently leads to organizational citizenship behavior. The results support the hypotheses and provide implications for developing a customer oriented organizational culture through leveraging customer contact