Individual Market Orientation and Its Implications On Job Performance: Does Sense of Togetherness Matters?
Muhammad Iskandar Hamzah, Abdul Kadir Othman, Faridah Hassan, Rosidah Musa, Mohd Zulkifli Abdullah
Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA
Abstract
In today’s world, businesses are gradually realizing the importance of employees’ needs and treating them as a ‘family’ in ensuring a happy and productive workforce. Undoubtfully, a happy employee will eventually create a happy customer. Furthermore, there is this ongoing interest over individualized form of market orientation. Individual market orientation or I-MARKOR, is essentially revolved around how effective that salespeople is in acquiring, disseminating and utilizing the customer knowledge into productive actions that positively benefit the marketing firm. Nevertheless, the interaction effects of employees’ unity and togetherness on the link between I-MARKOR and job performance is relatively unknown due to insufficient works on I-MARKOR within the academia. A firm that enacts Group Culture is primarily inclined towards internal affairs and flexibility, by advocating the sense of mutuality, respect and trust among the employees. Hence, Group Culture is regarded as one of the best approach in nurturing a competent workforce. This study seeks to ascertain whether these market oriented outcomes can be possibly amplified with the inculcation of Group Culture within the firms. The scope of this study is focused on business-to-business (B2B) salespeople of financial institutions, often referred to as Relationship Managers (RMs). A field study participated by 539 RMs from 18 banks across the Klang Valley was conducted. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed using SmartPLS 3.0 to assess whether the theoretical model can fit well with the actual data. In general, the results demonstrate evidence for construct validity and reliability among all the variables. The results indicate that Group Culture significantly moderates the effects of Information Acquisition on Job Performance. The theoretical and practical implications are also discussed in this study, particularly on the right strategies and insights that could be deployed by marketers based on the model.
Keywords: Individual market orientation, Organizational culture, B2B; Marketing, Salespeople performance
