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THE EFFECT OF A MARKET ORIENTATION AND EMPLOYEE LEARNING ORIENTATION ON ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of a market orientation on employees’ organizational commitment, and the relationship between learning orientation and organizational commitment. This study explores particularly of the effects of managers’ perception of market orientation on organizational commitment. The first part of this study concentrates on summarizing the previous literature and research around the subject. Based on the literature review the conceptual model, consisting of three research hypotheses, is constructed. Second part of the study introduces the empirical research conducted and represents the empirical evidence to test the hypothesis of the research.

METHODOLOGY The data used in this study was collected as part of the survey conducted for Innonets II –project of Aalto University School of Economics’ Marketing department. The web-based questionnaire was nationwide, covering varying sizes of companies from different industries. The survey consisted of two separate questionnaires targeted to two hierarchical levels of employees within the organizations, to middle management level and employee level. The data collected included altogether 415 responses; 366 employee level and 49 managerial level responses. The Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis technique was used to test the hypotheses.

FINDINGS The findings of this study reveal that managers’ perception of market orientation positively affects the organizational commitment of employees. Additionally, the findings supported the hypotheses that there is a positive relationship between learning orientation and organizational commitment. The results of this study point to the importance of the managers’ responsibility to create an environment that enables the process of satisfying customers and to communicate these market-oriented values to the employees. The importance of creating market-oriented culture is that it should result in employees feeling valuable to the organization. Consequently, employees feel a sense of pride of belonging to the organization and become more committed to the organization, which is essential in today’s fast-paced and highly competitive business world.