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The Role of the Customer Advocate
Contextual and task performance as advocacy participation
Jane Galloway Seiling
Lawrence Technological University, Southfield MI, United States of America
Abstract
Contextual performance in the workplace has been identified as including relational activities that maintain the broader social and psychological environment in which task performance occurs in organisations.
In this conceptual writing, organisational advocacy (OA) is offered as a form of task and contextual performance that is pertinent in the 21st Century, especially while serving and working with customers on a day-to-day basis. Organisational citizenship behaviour is conceptualised as a component of the contextual performance of OA.
OA and customer advocacy are defined and models are provided, suggesting that what is thought, said, and done by organisational members must receive expanded attention, in this case, in dealing with internal and external customers.
Article Text
It is now assumed that failing to manage service strategically not only leaves customers angry, but also costs profits (Gale 1994; Schneider 1980). Customers now define and decide the fate of companies. Yet, the importance of customers continues to be taken for granted (Blanding 1991). Pertinent to this issue, the following statement by Schneider, Ehrhart, Mayer, Saltz and Niles-Jolly (2005: 1029) is a step in the right direction: ‘[C]ompanies should seek employee display of motivated behaviour in pursuit of important organisational outcomes—like customer-focused OCB’. This paper adds to the call for concern regarding what members ‘display’ through what they think, say, and do inside the task and contextual performances of involvement with customers.
According to Schneider (1980), ‘[O]rganisational dynamics have a direct impact on the people the organisation serves, as well as on employee performance and attitudes’ (p.53). Ultimately, positive organisation dynamics and the contributive choices of members result in the focus of this writing: members’ willingness to do the work well and the demonstration of concern for the customer pay dividends.
In a study by Motowidlo and Van Scotter (1994: 479), task and contextual performance was shown to involve different patterns of behaviour and these patterns ‘contribute independently to supervisor’s judgments about an individual’s overall worth to the organisation’. Task performance, the work-related activities performed by organisational members that contribute to the technical core of the organisation (Borman & Motowidlo 1997), has long been a focus of research. In recent years, contextual performance, the activities performed by members that help to maintain the broader organisational, social, and psychological environment in which the technical core operates (Motowidlo, Borman & Schmit 1997), has also become a focus of researchers.
The purpose of this conceptual paper is to define and discuss, through the lens of task and contextual performance, the concepts of organisational advocacy (OA), customer advocacy and advocacy participation as performance factors in serving one’s customers. (Workplace advocacy issues also include self-advocacy, leader advocacy, member advocacy, customer advocacy, community advocacy and inclusion advocacy [see Table 1]).
In the following, first, customer advocacy, a subset of organisational advocacy (Seiling 2001), is introduced and a model of organisational advocacy is offered which includes customer advocacy. Second, the role of the customer advocate is described. Third, the activities of advocacy participation are described. Then, expressive activity approaches are noted as they relate to customer advocacy. Finally, implications for theory development and future research are offered.
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