The impact personality traits, role conflict and work family conflicton customer orientation: a review of extant literature

A review of extant literature explores the role stress variables such as role conflict and work-family conflict that moderate the relationship between a service employee's personality traits and customer orientation. The paper discusses studies that have established the link between personality traits and customer orientation, and provides an overview of existing theory as well as practice in a relatively unexplored area of interdisciplinary business research. Findings The evidence from the extant literature therefore can be used to propose a moderating role for role conflict in the relationships between the big-five personality traits and customer orientation. This is mainly based on the findings that (i) role conflict and work family conflict directly affects service employees’ ability to deliver good service to customers and (ii) role conflict and work-family conflict causes emotional exhaustion among service employees, which leads to an inability on the part of the service employee to empathize with customers and to enjoy customer interactions.