The Role Of Perceived Organizational Support To Cross Selling And Leader Member Exchange In Bolstering Cross Selling Performance:Evidence From Banking Sector Of Pakistan

Relationship marketing offers valuable and reliable tools that service organization's managers can use to improve a service that is being provided to a wide range of clients. With a focus on mutual accomplishment of common goals, relationship marketing provides a finer solution to client interaction. It has been viewed as a beacon light in apprehending, instituting and sustaining a solid customer foundation. Customer relationships worth even more in case of services, because services have interpersonal focus and it is relatively hard to evaluate their quality with objective measures. Relationship marketing aims not only at attracting new clients but also at retaining existing ones. As acquiring a new customer can reportedly cost 5 to 10 times more than retaining an existing one therefore, there is enough motivation towards adopting customer retention as strategy. A great deal of strategies have been devised by researchers to grasp the challenge of customer retention. The stratagem of cross selling is one amongst them. Cross-selling leads to a broader scope for the customer relationship, increasing not only share of wallet but also the firm's “share of mind” with the customer. While cross selling is meticulously studied, the role of cross selling performance, in literature, is relatively sparse.The aim of the research is to examine the role of perceived organizational support to cross selling and Leader Member Exchange(LMX) in improving cross selling performance of employees.The study also attempts to seek out the mediating role of the direct antecedents of cross selling performance. For this purpose, the study develops and tests a comprehensive model that relates perceived organizational support to cross selling(POSCS) and Leader Member Exchange(LMX) to the direct antecedents of cross selling performance that eventually results in cross selling performance.The study adopts internal relationship marketing approach whereby frontline service employees play a very important role in executing cross selling strategy, designed by management, for customer retention purpose. The relationship building process needs to be initiated internally before extending it to customers. Cross selling is, thus,used as a vehicle for relationship marketing practices.Data has been collected from 230 cross selling employees of Pakistani Banks. The study uses the method of structural Equation Modeling to test the model and obtain results.Results of the study reveals that perceived organizational support and Leader Member Exchange positively affect the direct antecedents of cross selling performance which, in turn, results in an improvement in cross selling performance. The study, thus, not only confirms the contributing role of perceived organizational support and Leader Member Exchange, but also corroborates the mediating role of the direct antecedents of cross selling Performance.