Wage Inequality: Its Impact on Customer Satisfaction and Firm Performance

This article adopts a marketing perspective to examine how wage inequality between top managers and their employees may have customer-related consequences (i.e., customer-directed effort, opportunism, customer-oriented culture) that affect customer satisfaction firm performance. Surprisingly, scholars practitioners largely neglected this pressing societal issue. The authors collect cross-industry, multisource data set, including responses by top-level objective on performance from 106 business-to-business-focused firms (Study 1). In addition, they analyze longitudinal panel covering 521 firm-year observations for business-to-consumer-focused 2). results consistently reveal harms satisfaction. relationship is mediated opportunism culture but not effort. Moreover, while has positive direct effect short-term profitability, dampened the negative indirect through Importantly, of profitability vanishes in long run, whereas adverse persists, leading nonsignificant total long-term profitability. These findings guide researchers, managers, shareholders, policy makers addressing challenge rising inequality.