| A market orientation (MO) has recently drawn renewed interest of marketing scholars for enhancing business performance in a strategic context. The term supply chain management (SCM) has risen to prominence in the past ten years. Supply chain management extends the concept of functional integration beyond a firm to all the firms in the supply chain. The individual members of a supply chain help each other improve the competitiveness of the supply chain, which should improve competitiveness for all supply chain members. Both the concepts—a MO and SCM—have a lot in common in their conceptualization as (1) they pursue customer value creation through capturing, sharing and responding to market information, (2) they are interfunctional in nature, and (3) they have become essential in corporate strategy.; This study attempted to contribute to the body of knowledge of marketing and logistics by empirically investigating the relationship between a MO and SCM. An integrative theoretical model was developed and specific hypotheses were tested about the MO-SCM link and how it can enhance business performance of the individual firms in a supply chain. Data were collected based upon the Member Roster of the Council of Logistics Management and analyzed through structural equation modeling. The test results confirmed that a MO has strong, positive impact on business performance of individual firms. The relationships between a MO and a SCO and between a SCO and SCM were also found to be positive that offered the existence of the MO-SCO-SCM path. As a byproduct of this research, a unified theory of supply chain management was proposed and measured. |
