Making the Customer Orientation of Salespeople Unsustainable—The Moderating Effect of Emotional Exhaustion

Customer orientation of salespeople usually leads to a sustainable positive effect on job performance, yet previous research has usually focused on the benefits of functional customer orientation, and less is known about its relational customer orientation’s outcomes. Based on conservation of resources theory, this research focuses on both types of customer orientation, functional and relational customer orientation, and investigates the moderating effect of emotional exhaustion on the relationship between customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior. We collected 282 valid questionnaires from frontline salespeople in China. Results showed that functional/relational customer orientation was positively correlated with salespeople’s adaptive selling behavior. Salespeople’s emotional exhaustion moderates the main effect: when emotional exhaustion is high, the relationship between functional/relational customer orientation and adaptive selling behavior is substantially weakened. This study contributes to a further understanding of the sustainable operation environment for customer orientation, and provides practical implications regarding the attainment of sustainable outcomes of customer orientation.