On the Interactive Effect of Personality Traits and Achievement Motive on Customer Orientation

Abstract

Past studies revealed that employee’s customer orientation was positively and sig-nificantly correlated with her/his job performance as well as her/his customer’s satis-faction. Subsequently studies were conducted to examine the determinants of cus-tomer orientation. These studies generally found three.conscientiousness, agree-ableness, and emotional stability.of the big five personality traits significantly asso-ciated with customer orientation. No study has examined the effect of motives on customer orientation. Winter et al. (1998) showed that personality traits and TAT-measured implicit motives, conceptually distinct and empirically unrelated, inter-acted in predicting behavior. Inspired by the spirit of the paper but expanding its ho-rizon, we simultaneously examine not only the individual effects of the big five per-sonality traits and self-attributed explicit achievement motive.one of the four major motive constructs McClelland (1987) illustrated.on customer orientation, but also their interactive effects in the present study. As expected, conscientiousness and agreeableness are found positively and significantly correlated with customer orienta-tion, but openness to experience does so unexpectedly. Predictably, extraversion alone is found not significantly correlated with customer orientation, and so is emo-tional stability, but the latter to the contrary to our hypothesis. Interactive effects be-tween openness and achievement motive as well as that between extraversion and achievement motive also reach statistical significance on customer orientation as hypothesized. Implications of the results are discussed in a context of customer ori-entation and in a broader context of motive-trait debate