Relationships between employee attitudes, customer satisfaction and departmental performance

Describes how relationships were studied between employee attitudes, customer satisfaction, productivity, and administrative effectiveness at two points in time in a computer-hardware customer-service organization - 281 employees from 92 departments participating at time 1, and 215 employees from 87 departments participating in a follow-up survey ten months later. Performance and customer satisfaction were associated with employees believing that they have input in evaluating success and have confidence in the management team. Employee attitudes accounted for significant and practically meaningful proportions of variance in performance. The ability of attitudes to predict unit performance and customer satisfaction increased over time. Discusses the results in terms of the value of upward feedback for increasing employee sensitivity to managerial and unit performance and for enhancing managers’ attention to behaviours that influences departmental performance and customer satisfaction.