This study aims to examine how frontline employees’ goal orientations shape customer-perceived service quality and how these effects vary across service and goods contexts. It focuses on performance-prove, performance-avoid and learning goal orientations and their effects on technical and functional service quality.
Dyadic data were collected from 584 salespeople and 1,603 customers nested within 68 firms. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to test cross-level relationships, with industry context (service vs goods) as the primary moderator and sales environment (B2B vs B2C) as a supplementary moderator.
Goal orientations exert distinct effects across service quality dimensions. PPGO is positively associated with both technical and functional quality but may exhibit a notable trade-off in service contexts, enhancing functional quality while weakening technical quality. PAGO shows context-dependent effects, with its influence on functional quality becoming weaker in service than in goods contexts. LGO improves technical quality but is not significantly related to functional quality and remains stable across contexts. Industry context reveals cross-dimensional trade-offs, while sales environment provides additional evidence that the effects of goal orientations vary across relational contexts.
This study identifies goal orientation as a key antecedent of service quality and demonstrates that its effects are contingent on industry context rather than universally applicable. By distinguishing between service and goods contexts and between technical and functional service quality, it reveals nuanced and sometimes conflicting effects of goal orientations, including a cross-dimensional trade-off in service contexts.
