A Study Of The Relationship Among Service Orientation, Internal Marketing Pperformance And External Marketing Performance

In the field of service marketing management, both the internal marketing and external marketing are key factors influencing organization performance, and many studies have aimed to discuss the related antecedents of improving these features. Most of these studies have focused either on the examination of managerial subjects or the perceived service quality from customer perspective, and paid little attention to the impact of service orientation. Moreover, the positive correlation between internal and external aspects of the organization proposed by Heskett's service profit chain is relatively deficient. This study is to extend the theory on service orientation and develops a comprehensive model for simultaneously integrating service orientation, internal and external marketing performance form the perspectives of employees and customers.Employees and customers of full service restaurant are surveyed simultaneously with different questionnaires, and effective samples from 212 employees and 424 customers were collected. Multiple regression and SEM analysis were used to analyze the causal relationship of the various study constructs.Overall the research data provide at least moderate support for the research model hypotheses. The result reveals that 1) individual service orientation positively influences internal marketing performance which includes employee job satisfaction, organization commitment, and employee retention. Also, individual service orientation has a positive relationship with customer satisfaction which is one of the variables of external marketing performance, but the relationship with another variable, customer retention shows insignificant.2) Organizational service orientation has a positive impact on both the internal marketing performance and external marketing performance.3) The research construct shows no significant statistical relationship between internal and external marketing performance, but a further regression analysis demonstrated the insignificant positive relationship between employee job satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and the significant positive relationship between employee retention and customer retention. Based on above research findings, several theoretical and practical implications were discussed and directions for future research were also addressed.