تنوع در مجموعه اجرایی: یک رویکرد مبتنی بر منابع برای رابطه عملکرد مشتری مداری - سازمانی

Taking a resource-based approach and thereby arguing that top management team (TMT) diversity is a tacit knowledge, this paper addresses how TMT experience diversity complements TMT functional diversity in explaining the effect of customer orientation on organizational performance. It is argued that when TMT functional diversity is leveraged with TMT experience diversity, this bundled tacit knowledge operates as a transformational capability, strengthening the relationship between customer orientation and organizational performance. Results from a survey of top management executives at the SBU level support our prediction for a positive three-way interaction between customer orientation, TMT functional diversity, and TMT experience diversity on organizational performance. Our findings suggest that the effect of customer orientation on organizational performance increases when the level of both functional diversity and experience diversity increases. Implications for TMT diversity and implementing customer orientation are discussed.

Despite the accolades and undivided attention that customer orientation has received in the marketing literature, little empirical evidence exists to suggest that this construct leads to higher organizational performance (e.g., Noble et al., 2002). The few findings that do exist are mixed and equivocal. Several scholars have acknowledged the role that a top management team (TMT) plays in the formation and development of customer orientation (e.g., Kohli and Jaworski, 1990). The term top management team (TMT) is consistent with the upper echelon concept advanced by Hambrick and Mason (1984) and the dominant coalition construct proposed by Cyert and March (1963). A TMT is typically comprised of senior executives such as vice presidents and senior level managers that serve on the board of directors in most firms (Finkelstein and Hambrick, 1990 and Haleblian and Finkelstein, 1993). Drawing on the upper echelon perspective (Hambrick and Mason, 1984), we believe that the inconsistency in explaining the relationship between customer orientation and organizational performance rests on the moderating role of the nature and characteristics of those that initiate and champion such a customer orientation. In particular, we look at two critical types of TMT diversity that we believe will provide important contextual factors in shaping the relationship between customer orientation and organizational performance. These two types of diversity are TMT functional diversity and TMT experience (or tenure) diversity. We argue that these two different dimensions of diversity reflect intangible resources in an organization in that they represent complementary tacit knowledge (Carpenter et al., 2001). We contend that when these two dimensions of diversity are bundled so that experience diversity complements functional diversity, this interaction will contribute to a better understanding of the conditions under which customer orientation will lead to greater organizational performance. We argue that TMT functional diversity attenuates the effect of customer orientation on organizational performance by binding strategic consensus and impeding effective information dissemination. When TMT functional diversity is complemented by TMT experience diversity, however, the latter makes up for what the former lacks, or reduces the costs associated with the former and thereby jointly strengthens the effect of customer orientation on organizational performance. The goal of this research is to acknowledge the combination of TMT functional and experience diversity as complementary human capital resources, which explain the relationship between customer orientation and organizational performance. We believe that this research is unique and thereby contributes to the literature in explaining the mixed and conflicting relationship between customer orientation and organizational performance by drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) as a conceptual framework. Our central thesis in the paper is that the effect of TMT functional diversity on the customer orientation–organizational performance relationship increases as TMT experience diversity increases. In other words, we expect customer orientation to have a negative effect on organizational performance when functional diversity is not complemented by experience diversity, but a positive effect when functional diversity is complemented by experience diversity. Our paper is organized as follows. We start by explaining the theoretical background of our research. To this end, we draw on the RBV to develop our arguments about the shortcomings of functional diversity, and how experience diversity, when bundled with functional diversity, can strengthen the customer orientation–organizational performance relationship. Based on our conceptual framework, we develop our contingency hypothesis of how the effect of customer orientation on organizational performance is a function of the combination of TMT functional diversity and TMT experience diversity. This is followed by empirical results obtained from a large survey of TMT executives in the manufacturing industry. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the theoretical contributions, managerial implications, limitations, and future research directions.