The Joint Effects of Perspective Taking and Proactive Personality on Customer Service Performance

The effect of perspective taking on performance is well documented in extant literature, yet a lack of theoretical discussion explicates how employees’ adoption of the customer’s perspective results in satisfactory customer service performance. The current study fills this void. Drawing from both motivated information processing and proactivity perspectives, we establish a theoretical model that delineates the process of how customer-oriented perspective taking contributes to proactive customer service performance. We conducted a three-wave time-lagged study, involving 145 frontline employees and their immediate supervisors in the Chinese hospitality industry, to test the research model. The results of multilevel structural equation modeling show that a high level of role-breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) (Time 2) results when employees take the customer’s perspective (Time 1). This relationship becomes stronger if employees are also high in proactive personality (Time 1). Furthermore, a high level of RBSE (Time 2) mediates the interactive effects of customer-oriented perspective taking (Time 1) and proactive personality (Time 1) on proactive complaint-handling performance and proactive customer service performance (Time 3). These findings provide theoretical and managerial implications for research on both perspective taking and proactivity.