However, few successful efforts have been made to evaluate the impact of market orientation on operational employee characteristics or behavior.
We suggest that it is the neglect of this intervening variable that has partly confounded attempts to demonstrate a clear positive relationship between market orientation and operational employee characteristics, such as morale, job satisfaction, and retention.
An exploratory study of market orientation in UK retail companies, grounded in case study research, adopts a novel survey design that compares managerial perceptions of market orientation with operational employee beliefs and attitudes.
Any retailer could copy the Sears measures even our modeling techniques and still fail to achieve an operational employee-customer-profit chain, because the mechanics of the system are not in themselves enough to make it work.
In this quasi-experimental study, as the first phase, 190 operational employees of an ORC were recruited.
Four case studies were conducted in UK private sector service organizations using semi-structured interviews with service directors, team leaders, and operational employees.
With the second type, operational employees were not involved in the design process; they feared the new costing system, because it was used to enforce compliance, and no operational improvements emerged.
A senior employee of the U.S. Marshals recently provided documents to the Judiciary Committee showing that many of the agency's 3,900 operational employees have body armor with expiration dates in 2016 and 2017.
In the course of a recent research project, the authors concluded that by talking with employees, rather than simply issuing orders, leaders can promote operational flexibility, employee engagement, and tight strategic alignment.
In today's competitive environment, managers can no longer afford the costs inherent in this compact and are striving to change their relationship with labor to achieve competitive advantages such as lower cost, increased operational flexibility, employee commitment, and improved customer service.
But a company can get comparable results from focusing on customers, innovation, operational excellence, employee engagement or some other goal integral to the company's success.
