Market orientation and retail operatives' expectations

Market orientation, and particularly the link with business performance, has been widely studied using the new measurement systems emerging in the 1990s. However, few successful efforts have been made to evaluate the impact of market orientation on operational employee characteristics or behavior. An exploratory study of market orientation in UK retail companies, grounded in case study research, adopts a novel survey design that compares managerial perceptions of market orientation with operational employee beliefs and attitudes. The study highlights an important issue neglected in the existing literature - the impact of enhanced employee expectations about management behavior in market-oriented companies and the influence on employee behavior of the confirmation or disconfirmation of those expectations by management. We suggest that it is the neglect of this intervening variable that has partly confounded attempts to demonstrate a clear positive relationship between market orientation and operational employee characteristics, such as morale, job satisfaction, and retention. The findings show that employees in market-oriented companies are aware of service and quality imperatives, but report little of the changes in their job attitudes in terms of motivation, team spirit, or autonomy in the workplace, that are predicated by the literature. These findings offer several new insights and identify important directions for executives and marketing scholars in addressing the market orientation issue.