تاثیر عدالت ابتکاری توسط مشتری در رفتارهای مشتری گرا  The effect of customer-initiated justice on customer-oriented behaviors

1. Introduction Through their interactions with customers, frontline employees (FLEs) play a pivotal role in the value delivery process (Grizzle, Zablah, Brown, Mowen, & Lee, 2009). Consequently, FLE customer-oriented behaviors are a critical determinant of customer satisfaction and, ultimately, of organizational profitability (Celuch, Robinson, & Walsh, 2015; Stock & Bednarek, 2014; Zablah, Franke, Brown, & Bartholomew, 2012). Customer-oriented behaviors refer to “worker behaviors that are focused on engendering customer satisfaction” (Grizzle et al., 2009, p. 1228). Customer-oriented behaviors involve actively listening to customers during frontline interactions and directing the effort necessary to ensure that customers’ needs are satisfied. Insight into potential factors that foster FLE customer-oriented behaviors are thus vitally important for improving the performance of both sales-based and service-based organizations (Stock & Bednarek, 2014). In sales and services contexts, customers themselves can be considered a potential factor that influences the extent to which FLEs perform behaviors that engender customer satisfaction (e.g., Yi, Nataraajan, & Gong, 2011) because customers’ behaviors frequently influence FLE emotional states and work-related motivations (Harris, 2013). For example, studies indicate that irrational or unreasonable customer behaviors are strongly linked to salespeople’s feelings of anger or resentment toward customers, which often inflate salespeople’s distress and emotional labor (Rupp, McCance, Spencer, & Sonntag, 2008). In contrast, when customers are generally cooperative and respectful, salespeople are likely to respond by expending effort on customeroriented behaviors that promote customer need satisfaction (Yoon, Seo, & Yoon, 2004). While there is some evidence of the impact of customer-initiated justice on FLE attitudes toward customers (Spencer & Rupp, 2009), extant research has largely failed to examine the role of customer-initiated justice as a motivator of FLE behaviors toward customers. To address this gap, this research investigates the influence of customer-initiated justice on FLE customer-oriented behaviors, with a specific focus on improving understanding of the mechanisms that explain why customer-initiated justice affects FLE customer-oriented behaviors. Toward that end, this study posits that customer-initiated justice impacts FLE customer-oriented behaviors through its effect on employee-customer fit and self-efficacy, two variables that exert an interactive effect on FLE customer-oriented behaviors.