The Spillover Effect of Psychological Ownership: How Customer Trust Strategies Reshape Employee Motivation Through Value Internalization

Abstract

Customer trust-building strategies are typically evaluated through customer satisfaction, loyalty, service quality, and financial performance, while their internal effects on employees receive less attention. This study examines how workplace-level customer trust practices influence employee motivation through ownership-enabling work experience and value internalization. Drawing on the structure and measures of the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study, the analysis applies a 2-1-1 multilevel serial-mediation model to 18,562 employees nested within 1,916 workplaces. Customer trust-building strategies are operationalized as a bundle of customer listening, satisfaction and quality targets, service training, monitoring, and external assurance practices. The results show that these practices are positively associated with employee motivation and that this relationship is partly transmitted through employee autonomy, voice, responsibility, participation, and organizational value internalization. Relational and customer-learning practices exhibit stronger motivational associations than assurance- and control-oriented practices. Monitoring and auditing are more positively related to motivation when employees also receive discretion and opportunities to participate. The study contributes primarily to service management, strategy implementation, and strategic human resource management by showing that customer-facing strategies depend on internal work design and value communication. Psychological ownership is treated as a supporting management-psychology mechanism rather than the main theoretical focus.