Examining the Mechanisms Linking Supervisor Support, Organizational commitment, Employee Customer Orientation, and Unit Performance: A Multilevel Moderated Mediation Model

Relationships between supervisor support, organizational commitment, and employee outcomes are traditionally investigated at the individual level. This paper extends prior research by testing such relationships at both individual and work-unit level. First, it explores the mediating effect of employee organizational commitment between perceived supervisor support and employee customer orientation and withdrawal behavior. Second, this study investigates the mediating effect of work-unit level of commitment between supervisor support climate and work-unit performance measured by customer-perceived service quality and annual sales. We thus suggest that organizational commitment functions as a mediator both at the individual level and at the work-unit level. Even though the construct’s content remains the same across levels, theoretical rationales for the effects of commitment at different levels differ: commitment at the individual level mediates the effect of supervisor support on employee outcomes according to a norm of reciprocity and social exchange process, whereas work-unit level of commitment mediates the effect of supervisor support climate on work-unit performance by changing the general climate in which the group operates. Furthermore, we posit that the mediating effect of work-unit commitment is moderated by customer orientation climate. We suggest that supervisor support climate strength has a cross-level interactive effect on the relationship between employee’s supervisor support perceptions and commitment. Hierarchical linear modeling and bootstrap regression analyses conducted on data collected from 857 employees belonging to 31 hotels, and from hotels’ customers, and on objective data (annual sales) confirmed our predictions. First, results of bootstrap analyses showed that employee commitment mediated the effect of supervisor support on both customer orientation and turnover intention. At the work-unit level, commitment mediated the effect of superviso