The Selling Orientation-Customer Orientation (S.O.C.O.) Scale: A Proposed Short Form

By Raymond W. Thomas, Geoffrey N. Soutar, Maria M. Ryan. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2001

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reports the results of an examination of the Selling Orientation-Customer Orientation scale to determine if the number of items could be reduced while still maintaining the scale's dimensionality and consistency. Analysis of a new Australian data set was undertaken using data from 250 salespeople, 157 of their managers and 276 of their customers in a range of business to business markets. The findings provide evidence that salespeople's customer orientation, as defined by Saxe and Weitz (1982), can be measured with little information loss by ten items, rather than the twenty-four items originally suggested. This significant reduction in length may contribute to a more reliable and valid scale by reducing response fatigue and acquiescence bias, as well as making it possible to include the construct in larger studies with other multiple item scales. Further research is suggested to test the revised scale across a number of industries and consumer groups, to verify its generalizability.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a774cd1d56abd0778864832d21f0cb5983e6356c

Citations in the corpus

• Principles and Principals: Do Customer Stewardship and Agency Control Compete or Complement When Shaping Frontline Employee Behavior? (2012, unknown): “Research on CO takes place at both the organizational (Kennedy, Goolsby, and Arnould 2003; Kohli and Jaworski 1990) and the individual (Brown Principles and Principals / 3 et al. 2002; Donavan, Brown, and Mowen 2004; Thomas, Soutar, and Ryan 2001) levels of analysis.”