EXPRESS: From Employee Orientation to Customer Identification: A Three-Level Study of Restaurant Service Encounters

In hospitality settings, customers infer organizational values through frontline service encounters. Drawing on signaling theory and social identity theory, this study examines how employee-oriented organizational values are associated with customer identification. Matched multi-source data from 44 Chinese restaurants (866 frontline employees and 2,583 customers) were analyzed using three-level multilevel structural equation modeling. Employee orientation was positively associated with employee identification, which related to customer orientation and customer identification; customer orientation mediated the employee identification–customer identification relationship. Organizational formalization strengthened the employee orientation–employee identification association and the overall cross-level process. These findings show how organizational signals may be associated with customer outcomes across the firm–employee–customer chain and position frontline employees as both receivers and transmitters of organizational signals.