Customer Orientation, Innovation and the Mediating Role of Crowdsourcing in Organizational Performance

Abstract

This study aims to explore the relationship between customer orientation, innovative and organizational performance as well as to ascertain crowdsourcing’s mediating role in augmenting innovative performance in the Turkish Defense and Aerospace Industry. A survey was distributed to 54 C-level executives who are members of Turkish Defense and Aerospace Manufacturers Association (SaSAD). First, a regression analysis was used to predict the impact of customer orientation on innovative and organizational performance. Then, a hierarchical regression analysis was performed to assess if crowdsourcing has a positive impact on enhancing innovative performance. While customer orientation has a somewhat moderate impact on organizational performance, it enhances organizations’ innovative performance to a great extent. Furthermore, while innovative performance does not have an immediate positive impact on organizational performance in the short-term, crowdsourcing significantly helps organizations to augment their innovative performance. Whereas extant studies of strategic orientation have focused mainly on the orientation–performance relationship, very few studies provided quantitative evidence regarding the exclusive impact of customer orientation on performance. More importantly, this study aims to explore the mediating role of crowdsourcing between customer orientation and innovative performance in the Turkish defence and aerospace industry, which has a completely peculiar structure.