نقش ابعاد جهت گیری استراتژیک یک شرکت در تعیین بازارگرایی

Little is known about how various strategic orientation dimensions determine market orientation. The authors identify four key dimensions of a firm's strategic orientation as critical antecedents to market orientation: the firm's aggressiveness, its future orientation, the extent of marketing formalization, and risk proclivity. Moderating effects of two environmental forces, competitive intensity and technology turbulence, are also considered in light of their relationship with various dimensions of strategic orientation and market orientation. Using a survey with firms spanning multiple industries, the proposed effects are tested with latent class analysis with multiple regimes. The results, based on an optimal two-regime solution, show that that although market orientation is significantly impacted by these strategic orientation dimensions, the pattern of influence differs based on a firm's membership in one of two regimes.

Market orientation has been, and will no doubt continue to be, central to a firm's ability to compete and garner superior rewards in business markets as well as consumer markets. Whether cast as a culture focused on understanding and satisfying customer needs (e.g., Slater & Narver, 1994) or as the support mechanism for collecting, disseminating, and responding to market intelligence on customer needs (e.g., Kohli & Jaworski, 1990), the study and understanding of market orientation have been substantial and far reaching. To date, market orientation has been the focus of hundreds of studies, excellent meta-analyses, and review articles (Cano et al., 2004, Kirca et al., 2005 and Liao et al., 2010) that highlight findings emerging from the body of works. The extant literature informs extensively on the outcomes of market orientation. Although some controversy exists regarding its influence in certain situations, evidence suggests that market orientation generates benefits in various direct and indirect patterns involving for example, innovativeness, customer loyalty, product quality, and ultimately firm performance (Grinstein, 2008, Jimenez-Jimenez and Ceggarra-Navarro, 2007 and Kirca et al., 2005). Interestingly, literature on the antecedents of market orientation, though also informative, is substantially less expansive; for instance, little is known about key drivers of market orientation from the firm's broader strategic orientation comprised of elements such as risk proclivity, aggressiveness, future orientation, for example (e.g., Morgan and Strong, 2003 and Venkatraman, 1989). While market orientation has been itself cast as a strategic orientation (e.g., Zhou, Yim, & Tse, 2005), and has been juxtaposed with other strategic orientation dimensions to understand its performance implications (e.g., Hult and Ketchen, 2001 and Noble et al., 2002), little is known about how other various strategic orientation dimensions impact or determine market orientation. Given that desirable outcomes and performance advantages most often derive from market orientation, such gaps in knowledge regarding these key determinants are troubling. To augment understanding and to address compelling questions regarding the role of elements in a firm's strategic orientation in driving market orientation, we look to the extant literature (e.g., Morgan and Strong, 2003 and Venkatraman, 1989) and identify several dimensions of the strategic culture as particularly key. Specifically, we argue that 1) the firm's aggressiveness, its strategic intent with regard to dominance and winning competitively (e.g., Hamel and Prahalad, 1989 and Johnson and Sohi, 2001); 2) future orientation, the firm's orientation with regard to an emphasis on long-term strategic considerations rather than immediate short-term immediate concerns,3) the extent of formalization with which the firm approaches marketing (c.f., Kirca et al., 2005, Slater et al., 2006 and Slotegraaf and Dickson, 2004); and 4) a firm's risk proclivity, its tendency to avoid risk taking or engage in greater risk taking (e.g., March and Shapira, 1987 and Morgan and Strong, 2003) will influence market orientation. Additionally, because the literature indicates the importance of a firm's context in understanding market orientation (e.g. Kirca et al., 2005), we examine the moderating effects of competitive intensity and technology turbulence (e.g., Zhou et al., 2005) on other strategic orientation dimensions' relationship with market orientation. We organize the remainder of the paper as follows. We continue with theoretical background that provides foundation to conceptualize the four strategic orientation dimensions. We then develop relationships regarding the dimensions' influence on market orientation, and also consider the moderating role of technology turbulence and competitive intensity. Following hypotheses development, we present our research methodology where we describe a multi-industry study of 186 firms and the data analytic approach. The literature generally suggests that unobserved heterogeneity across firms is problematic in uncovering effects of key strategic variables (e.g., Jacobson, 1990). Essentially, heterogeneity means that firms are unique in all aspects for example, resource endowments, culture, and decision-making processes (e.g., Wernerfelt, 1984), suggesting that researchers should account for heterogeneity to understand the effects of strategic orientation dimensions. Accordingly, we use latent class regression analysis to account for unobserved heterogeneity and to accommodate the existence of multiple latent regimes in the relationships specified (e.g., Hutchinson et al., 2000, Lee and Johnson, 2010 and Wedel and Kamakura, 2000). We discuss findings based on the optimal two-latent regime solution. We conclude with a discussion of implications for theory and practice.

In this research, we address a significant gap in understanding of market orientation antecedents and demonstrate that various elements in the firm's strategic orientation influence market orientation. Drawing on strategic orientation theoretical frameworks (Morgan and Strong, 2003 and Venkatraman, 1989), we argue that manifestations of aggressiveness, future orientation, marketing formalization, and risk proclivity feed into market orientation by building and strengthening it, or sometimes by diminishing it. Our latent class analysis indicates that heterogeneity exists between firms such that the pattern of effects differs between the two solutions identified in our sample. Generally this suggests that for a given set of firms, market orientation is influenced in certain ways by the strategic orientation dimensions, while for other firms, the pattern of influence differs. Our results indicate that aggressiveness exhibited strong influence on market orientation for both regimes, albeit in different directions. For the firms in Regime 1, aggressiveness enhanced market orientation. Consistent with the notions of strategic intent, apparently the firms in this group see satisfied, well served customers as a powerful means to competitive dominance. Likewise, the building of market knowledge and understanding of customer wants and needs inherent in market orientation may be cultivated as a key strategic resource to be leveraged by the strategically intent firm. It is important to note that our concomitant profiling shows the firms in Regime 1 were smaller. Thus, aggressive smaller firms possessing fewer resources than larger firms, are likely to place considerable emphasis on building market based assets (Srivastava, Shervani, & Fahey, 1998) via market orientation because market orientation clears the path for organic growth (a key goal for smaller firms). Interestingly, for the set of firms in Regime 2 (that profiling shows was larger in size), the relationship was opposite suggesting that aggressiveness may actually suppress market orientation. This could mean that aggressive larger firms may not place as much an emphasis on building market based assets via market orientation. For larger firms, significantly more effort and investment is required to move the needle on organic growth and, therefore, they may commit resources to avenues that promise higher returns; perhaps acquisition of new product technologies, vertical integration of supply chains, or acquisition of fast growing businesses, for example. We found that for the firms in Regime 2, future orientation suppressed market orientation. Firms focused on maintaining long-term viability and health apparently may see activities in existing markets as a more immediate issue, providing short-term performance benefits but not necessarily sustaining the firm over time. Served markets, either due to inherent changes in customer wants and needs or due to the technologies available to serve them, evolve and change, sometimes disappearing altogether. Thus, future orientation, perhaps for larger firms, apparently manifests as a strategic orientation dimension that is less consistent with a market orientation and even may detract from it. Risk proclivity and marketing formalization both enhance market orientation in Regime 2 where the firms are slightly larger. Larger firms are likely to have an established customer base providing a consistent revenue stream that allows them to stay large; hence risk averse large firms tend to build strong reliable relationships in their existing markets by firmly institutionalizing market orientation. Marketing formalization or the extent to which marketing strategy has a formalized place in the firm and is purposefully addressed, apparently manifests as a strategic orientation in ways that reinforce and build market orientation. Larger and more established firms may be more cognizant of marketing strategy formulation in general and of the need to treat it with a deliberate focus. Smaller firms may treat marketing strategy as a set of ad-hoc activities that could be executed by several divisions and actors in the organization, deducing that marketing strategy need not merit a formalized process. Although the literature and theory offers some insight about environmental/market uncertainty moderation in the building and growing of market orientation (Kirca et al., 2005), little guidance regarding moderation through technology turbulence and competitive intensity on market orientation antecedents is available. Our study offers needed information in this regard. Specifically, for the firms in Regime 1, which constituted the relatively smaller firms in our sample, both technology turbulence and competitive intensity suppressed the positive influence of aggressiveness on market orientation. In both cases, contextual effects perhaps pressured the firms to look to other resources and assets in their search for competitive dominance (e.g., Zhou et al., 2005), in turn resulting in strategic orientations less consistent with and reinforcing of market orientation. For the moderation relationships in Regime 2 we see a different pattern. Both market forces muted the negative effects of aggressiveness. In the face of technology turbulence and competitive intensity, aggressiveness as a strategic orientation apparently was less consistent with market orientation and did not serve to enhance it as much as when these market forces were not present. Both competitive intensity and technology turbulence further enhanced the effects of risk proclivity on market orientation suggesting that when under pressure, the risk averse firm retrenches and maintains focus on what it understands and knows. Technology turbulence enhanced the effect of formalization suggesting that firms may look to their markets for ways to capitalize on opportunities emerging from technology churn, thus strategic orientations geared toward formalization of the marketing function in these conditions may reinforce market orientation. For future orientation, competitive intensity amplified the negative influence on market orientation, and technology turbulence suppressed the negative influence. This indicates that long-term oriented firms in Regime 2 may perceive the benefits in current markets served as even more fleeting when competitors press the situation. They may see current markets as becoming exhausted to an even greater extent and perhaps more quickly in conditions of frenetic competition. Thus, in their orientation of looking beyond the present, these firms were even more likely to manifest their orientation in ways not consistent with a market orientation. In contrast, in technologically turbulent contexts, long-term oriented firms may seek to build understanding of customers' needs and wants, market knowledge, and strong market linking capabilities so that opportunities emerging from the technology churn may be better realized. The press to connect technology to markets so that it can be harvested over the long-term could soften the manifestation of future orientation in the firm's strategic orientation, promoting consistency with a market orientation.