Internal market orientation determinants of employee brand enactment

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to explore how the adoption of internal market orientation (IMO) can enhance front-line employee brand enactment within an interpersonal service setting. Insights from equity theory and the person – environment paradigm are drawn upon to develop a theoretical model describing the impact of IMO on employee – organization fit, employee – supervisor fit and employee – job fit and the consequences of IMO on employee brand knowledge and brand identification. Second, the role of various types of fit and brand knowledge/identification for front-line employee brand enactment is confirmed. Design/methodology/approach This study draws from service employees in a high-contact customer setting. Findings Results uncover two mechanisms for successful internal branding: increasing employee fit with the service environment and enhancing employee brand knowledge. Practical implications The study contributes to practice in that the findings outline a realistic understanding of how managerial actions facilitate employees’ alignment with the firm’s brand promise within the realm of the broader organizational context in which service delivery takes place. Originality/value The present study contributes in the extant literature as it enables a more holistic view of the drivers of brand-congruent behaviors among front-line employees. Moreover, it has a significant contribution for future researchers as it lays the ground to further examine how employees’ perceptions of internal marketing strategies shape their fit levels with different aspects of their working environment which also affect the internal branding efforts of service organizations.

University Markor: A Context-Specific Scale to Measure Market-Orientation in Universities

“…A few researchers have tried to encompass some internal organizational phenomenon like behaviors and attitudes into MO (Avlonitis & Gounaris, 1999;Boukis, Gounaris, & Lings, 2017), while the others count into MO, some external environmental factors such as competitors and distributors as well (Javanmard & Hasani, 2017;Lado, Maydeu-Olivares, & Rivera, 1998). Sharp (2001) argues that MO must take into account the customer satisfaction as well as the product development phenomenon, whereas, Hult, Cravens, and Sheth (2001) consider MO as consisting value chain components that cover "culture-behaviors-processes-actions-performance."…”

Organizational capabilities mediates between organizational culture, entrepreneurial orientation, and organizational performance of SMEs in Pakistan

“…Prior literature refers to this as entrepreneurial orientation. Researchers have paid considerable attention to entrepreneurial orientation over the last few years (Boukis, Gounaris, & Lings, 2017) to increase the performance of SMEs. To respond to this research question, some critical factors for the performance of SMEs have been identified.…”

The reincarnation of work motivation: Millennials vs older generations

“…Thus, creating a favourable and robust employer brand (EB) becomes important (Schlager et al, 2011) as it helps in promoting positive attitudes among current employees, who are proud to work for a strong-branded organisation, as well as to attract the best new millennial talent successfully. Internal employee branding has been shown to be linked to organisations with a strong internal marketing orientation (IMO) (Boukis et al, 2017), which in turn improves employees’ fit within the service organisation and leads to higher job satisfaction (Gounaris and Boukis, 2013), ultimately contributing to enhanced customer satisfaction with the original and repeat service.…”