Market Orientation, Business Strategy and Firm Performance: The Moderating Effects of Managers’ Personal Values

Abstract

The moderating effects of the market orientation- and the business strategy- performance relationships, where addressed at all (e.g., Zhou et al. 2007), are usually limited to external environmental factors. Additional possible moderating effects on performance, especially some internal factors such as managers’ personal values, have not been examined in the literature. While some studies have examined the link between senior management behaviour and market orientation (e.g., Harris and Ogbonna 2001), no existing study has focused specifically on the interactions between managers’ personal values and market orientation. In addition, some scholars suggest that certain bundles of personal values held by managers correspond to the strategies they choose (Pfeffer 2002). The interactions and compatibilities between managers’ personal values and the firm’s strategy have been overlooked. Managers’ personal values are poorly understood because their effects are invisible and ambiguous (Hambrick and Mason 1984). To fill the gap in the literature, the focus of this paper is on the possible existence and effect of managers’ personal values as moderating performance, i.e. to establish whether the manager’s personal values have a moderating effect on the market orientation- and the business strategy- performance relationships.