Do employee orientation and societal orientation matter in the customer orientation—Performance link?

Although conventional wisdom suggests that customers are critical to a firm's success, research remains inadequate on how to balance the firm's orientations toward different stakeholder groups for sustainable competitive advantage. In this study, drawing on both stakeholder theory and resource-based view, we investigate a firm's orientation toward three important stakeholder groups—customers, employees, and society—and examine their interactions and performance implications. We collected both archival and survey data from 180 Chinese firms to test our conceptual model. Our results demonstrate that customer orientation has a positive impact on market performance, but a negative impact on financial performance. More importantly, our findings illustrate that societal orientation can complement customer orientation to create stronger market performance, while employee orientation can buffer the negative impact of customer orientation on financial performance. We discuss the theoretical contributions and managerial implications, along with future research avenues, at the end of the article.