The Research On Relationship Between Internal Market Oritation And Employee's Customer Oritation

With the development of service industry,more and more managers have realized the need to focus internally on employees as well as externally on customers,through which employee satisfaction,customer satisfaction and long-term competition advantage can be achieved. Especially in IT sevice industry,its own professional,high-interactived and customaized feature have determined the attitudes and behaviors of customer contact employees as the crucial factor of customer perceived service quality.As a solution to strengthen employee's satisfaction and cunstomer orientation,internal marketing has been always one of the hot topics in the literature of service management discipline.Through 2 decades development,it still have no generally accepted definition and instrument to measure the concept.And much of the work done has been descriptive or prescriptive,very few research on the quantitative impact of internal marketing,and finally lake of theroical support and empirical test limit to its application in practise.Putting forward the notion of internal market orientation(IMO)by Lings in2004,define and classify internal marketing activities in a behavioral prospective,so provides a more effective implementation approach for internal marketing.This study argues the influence of employee's cunstomer by IMO.The sample including 104 frontline engineers from 5 IT service enterprises in Beijing was analyzed using SPSS 13.0.The results were obtained as follows:1.The framework of IMO established by western context still make sense in chinese culture.And it includes three components:internal market intelligence investigation,internal-intelligence dissemination,response to internal-intelligence.Besides,the differences among them to IMO is very significant.2.The higher the company's degree of IMO,the greater employee's satisfaction with their job,the stronger their affective commitment.3.The employee's cunstomer orientation include 2 kinds of behaviors:cunstomer need-oriented and task need-oriented.And the cunstomer need-oriented behavior explains the major meaning of cunstomer orientation.4.IMO has a indirect positive impact on employee's customer orientation,ES and AC play an inpormtant role as the intermediate variables.The greater emploee satisfaction,the stronger their affective commitment,the higher the emploee's degree of customer orientation. Base on the importance of IMO to the behavior of customer contact personel,service manager requires the integration of both the internal and external market and increaseingly focus on the wants and needs of internal customer in the future to achieve competitive advantage.