With the impact of globalization, businesses nowadays are searching for new ways to compete more effectively in today’s business marketplace. Companies that have already performed successfully in the external market but cannot perform well with their internal market may find themselves at a disadvantage in the long term (Ralston et al., 2006). Whilst businesses often spend significant amounts on their campaigns to attract external customers, they may also need to consider the internal market place and specifically their internal customers’ needs, i.e. employees, as they often have a significant impact on external market performance and profitability (Lings and Greenley, 2009). In light of fairly extensive literature on the employee management, the idea of viewing employees as internal customers was initiated from the concept of internal marketing and there are an increasing number of studies attempting to develop the concept of internal market orientation (IMO) to further facilitate the internal market exchange feasibility.Whilst employment relationship research has been served as a useful proxy for employee attitude and behavior (Choi & Peng, 2015), the notion that IMO could serve as a predictor of firm performance success has not yet been fully examined in the extant literature. Investigating such relationships combines the adoption of marketing perspectives with strategic human resource management across the organization per se. As such, drawing on data collected from 825 respondents across three different managerial levels in 275 organizations, this study contributes to the pertinent literature by developing a framework to measure the impact of IMO on organizational performance from the internal and external perspective as well as at the individual and the departmental level. Specifically, our findings reveal that IMO, consisting of internal information generation, internal information communication and responsiveness positively enhances employee retention, employee commitment, interdepartmental connectedness and significantly reduces interdepartmental conflict. In turn, given the exception of employee retention, these serve to significantly influence organizational performance. Our study provides several implications for scholars and management, as well as outlining some useful directions for future research.
The need for a co-alignment between internal and external marketing has largely been discussed in the literature. In an attempt to increase the conceptual and empirical body of knowledge, the present study follows a systematic presentation of balanced market orientation. After a brief literature review, it tackles research gaps building on theoretical hypotheses. An empirical examination based on 217 questionnaires, addressed to hotel managers, illuminates the role of culture in this context. Results unveil a significant positive relationship between internal marketing, market orientation and firm performance, irrespective of the underlying culture. Opting for a balanced market orientation, hotel managers gain particular insight into its principal axes and their interrelationships in practice.
Business environment, competition among firms in recent years, diverse and fragmented by the symbol of the consumer has become very complex and intense. Nevertheless, for the best performance of firms differentiated their company strives to have unique core competencies. In this study, reviewing the internal customer support activities and existing research on market orientation and then how it affects the future strategy for the internal customer support activities. Through the results of this study, first, to appear understanding of the effect of education and training to customers in enterprise-wide, strategic plan through competitor analysis, improved communication between departments, etc need to design to be effective in performance of company in a long term when in planning and training for employees such as job training, service training and training for improving service mind. Second, employment stability and internal communications to the employee's customer orientation showed no significant affect. This is considered for employees due to lack of fear or anxiety, so the employer could focus on his role in the current organization willing to participate actively for goals of the organization. Finally external customer orientation in the employee's customer orientation did not affect the analysis results which is appeared to in companies are constantly communicating with employees through the company's position and the difference between the employee's position is necessary to look for ways to narrow down.