gender differential paper IJCRB

ijcrb.webs.com
JUNE 2011
INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN BUSINESS VOL 3, NO 2
The common point among the criticisms is that there is a penalty if firms just respond to
customers’ wishes, which may make them blind about the changes in the environment.
Narver, Slater, & MacLachlan (2004) made an attempt to explain the reason why there are
contradicting results about the same construct. They believe that it is about understanding market
orientation too narrowly, so they suggest that market orientation has two dimensions- responsive
market orientation and proactive market orientation. In their studies, they researched the effects
of these two forms of market orientation on the innovativeness of the company and found out
that while proactive market orientation has positive effect, the former had negative.
Narver, Slater, and MacLachlan (2000) posited that researchers seem to have an insufficient
understanding of what it means to be market oriented because they mainly tend to ignore its
proactive dimension—the discovery and satisfaction of future needs of customer (Kohli &
Jaworski, 1990). Slater and Narver (1995) also argued that market orientation is ‘‘inherently
entrepreneurial’’ because a market oriented firm is able to anticipate and respond to the latent
and emerging needs of their customers (Jaworski, Kohli, & Sahay, 2000; Slater & Narver, 1998).
Narver et. al. (2004) accept the two-dimensional view of market orientation is not controversial
and they suggest until recently marketing scholars have not either explicated or paid enough
attention to the proactive dimension of market orientation. They also support their categorization
with Atuahene-Gima and Ko’s study (2001). Atuahene-Gima and Ko (2001) found that a
combination of market and entrepreneurial orientation improved the performance of product
development.
Narver et. al. (2004) suggested two fundamental sets of behaviors of market orientation
categorized as responsive market orientation and proactive market orientation. The first is
‘‘responsive’’ market orientation, referred to as ‘‘customer led’’ in Slater and Narver (1998) and
‘‘customer compelled’’ in Day (1999), in which a business attempts to discover, to understand,
and to satisfy the expressed needs of customers. Responsive market orientation is the market
orientation construct on which virtually all empirical analyses to date have focused. The second
set of behaviors is ‘‘proactive’’ market orientation in which a business attempts to discover, to
understand, and to satisfy the latent needs of customers. To date, the satisfaction of latent needs
has received some theoretical comment in analyses of market orientation (Kohli & Jaworski,
1990; Narver & Slater, 1990; Slater & Narver, 1995) but not many systematic empirical analyses
have been done.
Past studies have suggested that relationship between market orientation forms and firm
performance might be moderated by some environmental variables, such as market turbulence,
competitive hostility and market growth (Atuahene-Gima, 1995; Slater & Narver, 1994; Baker &
Sinkula, 2007; Ledwith & O’Dwyer, 2009). In their study Slater and Mohr (2006) analyzed the
moderating effect of strategy on the relationship between market orientation types and
performance. Thus, to date no empirical analysis of the market orientation–performance
relationship of which Narver and Slater (1990) and Kohli, Jaworski, & Kumar (1993) have
utilized adaptability as the moderating factor on the relationship between market orientation
forms and firm performance. This research is an attempt to expand on the past studies by
including adaptability of organizations as a moderating variable in the relationship between two
forms of market orientation and performance of the firms.
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