Does Flse Perceive Organizational IMO Impact on their Customer Oriented Behavior?

Abstract

Frontline Service employees (FLSEs) are responsible for the effective delivery of services and thus are critical in determining how customers evaluate organizations. Given their focal role in the exchange process it is essential that marketing strategies and programs targeting FLSEs, ensure they (the FLSEs) deliver on organization’s marketing programs and objectives. To achieve employee engagement with strategic actions, organizations develop internal marketing orientation (IMO) as a broad strategic approach which is designed to systematically understand and respond to employees’ needs by delivering the right ‘job’ product. This is analogous to traditional market orientation (MO), where firms gather external information and then respond to external customers’ needs. From the perspective of Internal Marketing (IM), it has been argued that even though management may craft the most carefully developed organizational internal market orientation (IMO), the successful implementation of these programs are contingent on how FLSE’s respond to IMO as a general concept. It is therefore vital for management to develop IMO at the organizational level (i.e. organizational IMO) that is viewed positively by employees. However, to date FLSEs’ perceptions of organizational IMO have been under-researched, which is somewhat surprising, even though some studies exist, given that it is FLSEs who determine whether IMO implementation succeed or fail. To address this gap, this paper develops and tests a conceptual model investigating if FLSE perception of organizational IMO impact on their job satisfaction (JS) and organizational identification (OI) and whether these in turn impacts on their customer oriented behaviors (COB) which is the ultimate focus of implementing IMO targeting FLSEs.