Increasing the productive energy of organizations through customer passion: An organizational-level study

This study explores how organizational energy can be increased through customer passion, i.e. the perceived affective commitment and positive word-of-mouth of customers. We integrate literature on organizational energy with research on customers' influences on employees and develop hypotheses for such a relationship at the organizational level. We test our hypotheses in a dataset containing 495 board members and 8'299 employees from 152 organizations. The results show that customer passion is positively related to organizations' productive energy which in turn is positively related to overall company performance. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the relationship between customer passion and organizational energy is stronger when the customer orientation of the top management team is high compared to organizations with a top management team with low customer orientation. By providing first insights into the consequences of customer passion for employees in organizations, this study opens a new avenue for scientific inquiry on the energizing impact of customers on organizations.