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Previous research has conceptualized and modeled customer orientation (CO) in one of two ways: as a psychological phenomenon antecedent to critical job states (i.e., stress and engagement) or as frontline employee behaviors that are caused by these same job states. Building on meta-analytic data, this study finds greater support for the causal relationships implied by a psychological construal of the construct and reveals that CO influences frontline employees'job outcomes through its effects on stress and engagement. Moderation analyses also indicate that CO's influence on model variables is stronger when frontline employees' customer workloads increase and is weaker as the need for customer persuasion increases. These findings contradict widely held assumptions rooted in a behavioral view of CO—namely, that CO is a consequence of job states, a proximate determinant of job outcomes, and most beneficial when ample opportunity for customer engagement exists. Overall, the results support a broadened perspective that recognizes that CO improves job outcomes because it enhances frontline employees' psychological welfare in addition to being good for business. These findings suggest that managers should consider CO an important criterion in frontline employee decisions, recognize CO as beneficial when limited opportunity for customer engagement exists, and avoid efforts to curtail CO's costs at the frontline employee level.

Employees who are engaged in their work are fully connected with their work roles. They are bursting with energy, dedicated to their work, and immersed in their work activities. This article presents an overview of the concept of work engagement. I discuss the antecedents and consequences of engagement. The review shows that job and personal resources are the main predictors of engagement. These resources gain their salience in the context of high job demands. Engaged workers are more open to new information, more productive, and more willing to go the extra mile. Moreover, engaged workers proactively change their work environment in order to stay engaged. The findings of previous studies are integrated in an overall model that can be used to develop work engagement and advance job performance in today's workplace.

This research uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the direct and indirect relationships among caring climate, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job performance of 476 employees working in a Chinese insurance company. The SEM result showed that caring climate had a significant direct impact on job satisfaction, organizational command, and job performance. Caring climate also had a significant indirect impact on organizational commitment through the mediating role of job satisfaction, and on job performance through the mediating role of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. In addition, job satisfaction had significant direct impact on organizational commitment, through which it also had a significant indirect impact on job performance. Finally, organizational commitment had a significant direct impact on job performance.

The authors combine findings from 155 samples of more than 31,000 salespeople to test alternative models of antecedents and consequences of adaptive selling behavior (ASB) and customer orientation (CO). A random-effects meta-analysis yields average values for 28 different correlations ranging from -.16 to .35, 19 of which are significant. Controlling for salesperson gender and selling experience, structural equation modeling indicates that ASB increases self-rated, manager-rated, and objective measures of performance, whereas CO increases only self-rated performance. Both ASB and CO increase job satisfaction. Tests of reciprocal relationships indicate that ASB increases CO and job satisfaction increases performance rather than vice versa. Selling experience increases performance but not job satisfaction, and saleswomen rate their performance and satisfaction slightly higher than salesmen do. The magnitudes of the relationships indicate that ASB and selling experience have greater effects than CO and gender on salesperson performance.

As individuals change jobs more frequently, it is increasingly important to understand what they carry from their prior work experience that affects their performance in a new organizational context. So far, explanations about the imperfect portability of experience have primarily been about firm specificity of knowledge and skill. We draw on psychological theory to propose additional sociocognitive factors that interfere with the transfer of knowledge and skill acquired from prior related work experience. As we hypothesized, we find that task-relevant knowledge and skill mediates the relationship between prior related experience and job performance and that it acts as suppressing mediator of a negative direct relationship between prior related experience and current job performance. We also find that the positive effect of prior related experience on task-relevant knowledge and skill is attenuated by higher levels of experience within the current firm.

In this paper we explore a causal mechanism through which high-performance work systems contribute to performance outcomes. We propose that high-performance work systems can improve organizational performance by strengthening relationships among employees who perform distinct functions, a pathway that is expected to be particularly important in settings characterized by highly interdependent work. In a nine-hospital study of patient care, we identify high-performance work practices that positively predict the strength of relational coordination among doctors, nurses, physical therapists, social workers, and case managers, in turn predicting quality and efficiency outcomes for their patients. Relational coordination mediates the association between these high-performance work practices and outcomes, suggesting a relational pathway through which high-performance work systems work.

This study examined the state of being recovered in the morning (i.e., feeling physically and mentally refreshed) as a predictor of daily job performance and daily compensatory effort at work. Ninety-nine employees from public service organizations completed a general survey and two daily surveys on pocket computers over the course of one workweek. Hierarchical linear modeling showed that being recovered in the morning was positively related to daily task performance, personal initiative, and organizational citizenship behavior and negatively related to daily compensatory effort at work. Relationships between the state of being recovered and day-specific job performance were moderated by job control. For persons with a high level of job control, the relationship between being recovered and daily performance was stronger.

This paper contributes to research on the outcomes of employee prosocial voice to managers by focusing on the relationships between voice and two managerially controlled outcomes: managerial performance ratings and involuntary turnover. Past research has considered voice from either the managerial or subordinate perspective individually and found that it can lead to positive outcomes because of its improvement-oriented nature. However, others have argued that voice can lead to unfavorable outcomes for employees. To begin resolving these competing perspectives, we examine agreement and disagreement between employees and their managers on the extent to which employees provide upward voice, proposing and demonstrating that considering either perspective alone does not fully capture how voice is related to employee outcomes. Findings from a study of 7,578 subordinates and their 335 general managers within a national restaurant chain indicate that agreement between employees and managers that employees display a high level of voice leads to favorable outcomes for employees. Our findings then extend existing research by showing that supervisor–subordinate disagreement around voice also helps explain employee outcomes—namely, how negative outcomes arise as a result of employees overestimating their voice relative to their managers' perspective and how positive outcomes result when employees underestimate their upward voice.

Adaptive performance is a facet of performance that reflects acquiring enhanced competencies in response to change. Micro-level researchers have assumed that adaptive performance is beneficial for task performance. Similarly, macro-level researchers have suggested that organizations need to attend to, monitor, and respond to contingencies in their environments for adaptive performance to be beneficial for firm performance. Drawing from the attention-based theory of the firm and resource theory, we suggest that perceptions of organizational politics and individual differences in conscientiousness constitute contingencies of the adaptive performance-task performance relationship. In a sample of 92 call center employees, we found that adaptive performance is positively associated with task performance but that conscientiousness and organizational politics jointly influence the adaptive performance-task performance relationship.

The last three decades have witnessed the spread of employee empowerment practices throughout the public and private sectors. A growing body of evidence suggests that employee empowerment can be used to improve job satisfaction, organizational commitment, innovativeness, and performance. Nearly all previous empirical studies have analyzed the direct effects of employee empowerment on these outcome variables without taking into account the mediating role of employee attitudes. This article contributes to the growing literature on employee empowerment by proposing and testing a causal model that estimates the direct effect of employee empowerment on performance as well as its indirect effects as mediated by job satisfaction and innovativeness. The empirical analysis relies on three years of data from the Federal Human Capital Survey/Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and a structural equation modeling approach, including the use of lagged variables. The results support the hypothesized causal structure. Employee empowerment seems to have a direct effect on performance and indirect effects through its influence on job satisfaction and innovativeness, two key causal pathways by which empowerment practices influence behavioral outcomes.