اثر مشتری مداری و جهت گیری کارآفرینی بر روی نوآوری: شواهدی از صنعت هتل داری در سوئیس

While researchers have explored the relationship between customer orientation, entrepreneurship and innovativeness with business performance in different organizations, few such studies exist on the hotel industry. This current work investigates the potential influences of these variables on hotel industry performance. Data for this study was collected through personal questionnaires collected from 156 hotel managers and owners from German and French speaking cantons located in Switzerland in order to examine the interrelation between innovativeness, customer orientation, entrepreneurship and service business performance dimensions (i.e., profit goal achievement, sales goal achievement and ROI achievement). The findings support aspects of prior research, but also provide some new insights by exploring customer orientation and innovativeness simultaneously and revealing how these factors impact upon the performance of the Swiss hotel industry. In the light of existing literature, limitations and future research directions are subsequently addressed.

Due to fierce competition in the marketplace, globalization and an explosion of technology in recent years, innovation and differentiation are considered as a necessity for every company (Tajeddini & Trueman, 2008a). At the same time, to achieve market success and sustain a competitive advantage, businesses need to exploit new opportunities, develop new products and/or services and markets (Berthon, McHulbert, & Pitt, 2004) as well as place customer orientation at the heart of the firm's competitiveness (Deshpandé, Farley, & Webster, 1993). Consequently, the past few years have witnessed great interest in the constructs of customer orientation, innovativeness and entrepreneurial organization by scholars across disciplines (e.g., Hult et al., 2004 and Liu et al., 2002). A wealth of thought over the years has developed evidence of our pursuit of innovativeness and the customer orientation imperative aimed at successfully enhancing business performance (Tajeddini & Trueman, 2008). Despite the fact that the service sector has become an extremely large part of the modern economy (Lee et al., 1996 and Oldenboom and Abratt, 2000) and there are a large number of studies which have paid attention to service organizations (e.g., de Brentani and Cooper, 1992, Jones, 1995 and Stevens and Dimitriadis, 2005), empirical work related to services is still quite scarce in empirical economics generally and particularly in innovation research (Hollenstein, 2000). Over the past few years, different scholars have tended to focus primarily on certain research streams concerning this issue. For example, Han, Kim, and Srivastava (1998) in the bank industry, Maydeu-Olivares and Lado (2003) in the insurance industry, Sandvik and Sandvik (2003) and Agarwal, Erramilli, and Dev (2003) in hospitality and others. However, there is a lack of innovation research about the hospitality sector (Orfila-Sintes and Mattsson, 2009 and Ottenbacher and Gnoth, 2005) and, more specifically, little knowledge exists regarding the effect of innovativeness, customer orientation, and entrepreneurial orientation on the performance of the companies that provide services to the consumer, such as hotels and leisure facilities. The existing literature is based on knowledge gained from the manufacturing sector. Nevertheless, “applying innovation theory to service sectors, we must take into account the inter sector heterogeneity which makes it important to study innovation in one specific sector at a time” (Orfila-Sintes & Mattsson, 2009, p. 380). Due to the constant change and increasing competitive pressures on today's hotel industry, hoteliers strive to maximize business results through growth and increasing profit margins. Hence, they face more demanding customers, new regulations, globalization, and the destabilizing effects of technological advancement. All of these critical factors change the hotel landscape significantly and are introducing new challenges and generating new requirements for hoteliers. Therefore, they have to be innovative (Giri & Tse, 2006), exploit marketplace opportunities (Ireland, Hitt, Camp, & Sexton, 2001) and, similar to other service organizations, develop long-term relationships with their customers (Grönroos, 1991 and Levitt, 1983). In view of the nature of the hotel industry, a more customer-oriented approach might be especially required of them for improved performance. Moreover, conventional wisdom holds that caution must be used in generalizing the results developed from manufacturing into the service sector. This issue should be taken into account in the hotel industry because it is a homogeneous industry that provides an important part of tourism services (Borooah, 1999) and it is also generic in the sense that different levels of hotel quality have little impact on hotel operations as such (Orfila-Sintes & Mattsson, 2009). The objective of this study, therefore, is to examine the impact of customer orientation, entrepreneurial orientation and innovativeness upon hoteliers' performance in Switzerland. The current study's emphasis is designed to provide hotel managers with more understandable guidelines on specific customer-oriented activities, identify opportunities and create a set of resources through which prospects can be exploited along with openness to new ideas and their consequences. We begin by examining the plausibility of innovativeness, entrepreneurial orientation and customer orientation as antecedents to hotel performance and offer a collection of associated hypotheses. In the methods section, the study sample of 156 Swiss hotels is discussed and the construct measures are evaluated. Next, the relationships among these constructs are assessed and discussed.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the extent to which customer orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, and innovativeness have a positive impact on hotel service performance. Some of the findings support prior research (e.g., Deshpandé et al., 1993 and Tajeddini et al., 2006), and also provide new insights by exploring customer orientation, entrepreneurial orientation and innovativeness simultaneously and assessing how these factors impact upon the performance of the hotel industry. This linkage is generally supported by the empirical data where higher levels of customer orientation, entrepreneurial orientation and innovativeness are associated with improved business performance. The results also show that customer orientation does not influence innovativeness. This finding is reminiscent of the work of Tajeddini and Trueman (2008a) who found that there was no significant relationship between customer orientation and innovativeness in small-sized service retailers. In addition, it endorses the arguments made by some scholars (e.g., Hagel and Singer, 1999 and Matsuo, 2006) who note that customer orientation and innovativeness have conflicting goals. In this regard, Hagel and Singer (1999) contend that this is because innovativeness and customer relationship building have very different economic, cultural, and competitive imperatives. Therefore, pursuing excellence in both is not possible. They further argue that innovativeness requires an employee centric perspective, whereas customer-orientation emphasises the customer. In contrast, this study conflicts with some previous research (e.g., Deshpandé et al., 1993, Narver and Slater, 1990 and Tajeddini et al., 2006) which found that continuous innovation is implicit in each customer/market orientation. This asserts that the relationship between marketing and innovation has often been uneasy (Berthon et al., 2004). Although the potential for friction between those who see the customer as the source of all wisdom (Berthon et al., 2004), and those who see innovativeness as the key component in the success of different industries (Hult et al., 2004) is very evident, it is worth noting that, in this sample at least, customer orientation and innovativeness variables are not significantly correlated. Given the importance and contribution of customer orientation and innovativeness in explaining positional advantage, it is recommended that further research should investigate the nature of the relationship between these two important issues. Furthermore, following the early assertions of Drucker (1954, p.37), in this field of business, it appears that the managers and owners in the hotel industry “put the customer's interest first” in order to develop a long-term profitable enterprise. Deshpandé et al. (1993) view customer orientation as being part of the overall corporate culture whose values reinforce and perpetuate this focus. This study suggests that, to improve performance, customer orientation, entrepreneurial orientation and innovativeness should be encouraged by managers and owners in the hotel industry and particularly if they perceive innovativeness in terms of openness to new ideas as an integral part of corporate strategy (Liu et al., 2002). In addition, it reinforces the marketing theorists view (Donavan, Brown, & Mowen, 2004) that service firms who focus their activities on the needs of their customers, i.e., behave in a customer-oriented way, perform better than those companies that do not. Overall, the findings of this study reveal that the hotel industry seems to have evolved in the context of market competitiveness, so that firms are in a more competitive position are likely to enhance their business performance. This is illustrated by Hult et al. (2004, p.436), who note that “Innovativeness is likely to be useful for allowing the firm to pre-empt competitors with new or improved products, diversify product lines, and generally expand the firm's scope of activities. All of these outcomes can help contribute to achieving sustainable competitive advantage.” Evidence from this study also points to the importance of managerial emphasis on the creation of an internal business environment conducive to innovative activities, focusing on the needs of the customer. Specifically, customer orientation, entrepreneurial orientation coupled with innovativeness was found to have a significant and positive effect on performance in the long-term. In general, if innovativeness is regarded as the early portion or early stage of innovation, members are usually sceptical about innovation. This causes them to attempt to resist its development and implementation. Therefore, it is necessary that this important component of openness should be institualized as a policy and value belief, an unwritten rule in service organizations such as the hotel industry in order that it may enjoy a higher performance outcome. Managers are advised to identify and value new ideas, processes, and services and create a culture of encouraging members to think out of the box and share their creativity and novel ideas.