آیا داشتن بازارگرایی منجر به سطوح بالاتر تعهد رابطه ای و عملکرد کسب و کار می شود؟ مدارک و شواهد از صنعت رباتیک کره ای

This study examines the impact of sales engineers having a market orientation on level of relationship commitment and, in turn, business performance. A model is proposed that suggests a positive relationship among these constructs. To test the model, a survey of sales engineers in the industrial robotics industry in Korea was conducted. Consistent with our predictions, our findings support the idea that having sales staff who have a market orientation leads to higher commitment to relationships and drives improved business performance. Implications are discussed.

The concept of market orientation grew out of longstanding recognition of the importance of the marketing concept in the marketing field. It was hypothesized that in order to maximize the effectiveness of marketing, the firm’s emphasis on marketing and market related information gathering needed to extend beyond the marketing department itself. In other words, the idea was that to maximize performance, the firm as a whole would need to have a market orientation. Dating back to two seminal articles written in 1990 (Narver and Slater, 1990 and Kohli and Jaworsk, 1990), market orientation has been found to have a positive impact on business performance in a broad range of industries (e.g., Day, 1994, Hunt and Morgan, 1995, Abdul-Muhmin, 2002 and Javalgi et al., 2005). In recent years, a considerable volume of research has focused on whether the presence of a market orientation within a firm improves the effectiveness of various employees in completing their tasks. For example, market orientation has been shown to help stimulate innovations in a new product context (Slater and Narver, 1998, Gatignon and Hubert, 1997 and Verhees and Meulenberg, 2004); help close service gaps (Guo, 2002); and improve the implementation of strategy (Dobni & Luffman 2003). In general, it has been observed that more attention needs to be paid to the mechanisms by which market orientation contributes to improved firm performance (Guo, 2002; Singh & Ranchod, 2004). Support for examining market orientation at the employee level is provided by a study conducted by Celuch, Kasouf and Strieter (2000). They note that greater understanding of the psychological processes that affect broader use of market information in the decision making process is needed, and recommended additional examination of market orientation at the employee level. In their study, Celuch et al. (2000) found that the degree of market orientation influenced employee perceptions of the benefits of using consumer information, as well as the employee’s perception of their own ability to collect and use such information. In this study, we will examine the impact of market orientation on relationship commitment and business performance. Prior literature suggests that building a high level of relationship commitment is important for success in the sale of industrial products, such as robotics. Thus, increased levels of relationship commitment should typically lead to improved performance. With this in mind, we address the following research questions in this study: 1) Do sales engineers who have high levels of market orientation including intelligence gathering and cross-functional orientation, customer orientation and competitor orientation, achieve high levels of relationship commitment? 2) Do higher levels of relationship commitment lead to higher levels of performance? The study is conducted in the context of the Korean robotic industry, which provides a good venue to examine these questions for multiple reasons. First, robots are a classic example of an industrial product and the industry is characterized by the need for high levels of personal selling. Consistent with other high cost industrial products, it is also an industry for which personal selling and relationship marketing clearly play a key role in corporate success (Teresko, 2005 and Weimer, 2005). Second, the robotics industry that is growing and increasingly global in nature. The global robotics market had sales of over $8 billion in 2003 and is estimated to reach US$ 16 billion in sales by 2007 (The Industrial Robot, 2003, The Industrial Robot, 2006, Quality, 2003 and Young et al., 2005). Finally, in spite of the growth of the robotics industry, very little academic research has been done in this context. In this study, we examine the degree to which salespeople in the industrial robotics industry have a market orientation affects relationship commitment, and, in turn business performance.