Service workers’ job performance:The roles of personality traits, organizational identification, and customer orientation

Purpose: Organizational identification refers to employees’ perceived oneness and belongingness to their work organization, and has been argued to be associated with higher employee performance. This research aims to advance the literature by testing the boundary of this relationship with reference to a key construct in employee performance in the service domain: employee customer orientation. Design/methodology/approach: We collected data based on a sample of call center service workers. Employees rated their organizational identification, customer orientation, and personality traits. Supervisors independently rated their subordinates’ performance. Variables statistic tools were employed to analyse the data and test a series of hypotheses. Findings: We found that customer orientation strengthens the relationship between organizational identification and service workers’ job performance, and enhances the mediating effect of organizational identification on the relationship between service workers’ personality trait (i.e., agreeableness) and their performance. Originality/value: This research advances an argument that employee customer orientation moderates the relationship between employee organizational identification and employee job performance in the call center service provision domain. In addition, this is a pioneering study examining the roles of personality traits on employee organizational identification.