Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1996

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Business Administration

Major Professor

John T. Mentzer

Committee Members

Joseph O. Rentz, David W. Schumann, William E. Cole

Abstract

The goal of this dissertation research was to clarity a part of the structural mechanism of markets in relation to the business's market orientation. Although market orientation has attracted renewed research interests, there exists a great amount of confusion as to what it means (construct of market orientation), how it is developed (antecedents of market orientation), and what economic outcomes are associated with it (consequences of market orientation). As market orientation is argued to be a core concept of marketing, such conceptual and structural confusions present a serious impediment for marketing scholars to advance the knowledge of markets. The research problem of this dissertation, therefore, was as follows:

What constitutes a market orientation, how is it developed, and what is its result?

Building on the extant literature and in-depth interviews, the extended market orientation (EMO) was proposed in this dissertation. Incorporating a broader range of market factors than those of existing constructs, the EMO scale was related to internal and external antecedents, and economic performance measures to explain the structural mechanism of the market. Hypotheses were developed on the proposed model, and were tested by extensively applying the structural equation modeling technique.

General findings of the study were:

  1. The Extended Market Orientation (EMO) scale has more desirable properties than the existing market orientation scale;
  2. The EMO model supports the fundamental economic rationale of being market oriented;
  3. The strategy type appears to be an important determinant of the strength of EMO-performance relationship; and
  4. The environmental (internal and external) factors do not seem to play significant roles in explaining variation of the EMO in the context of economic performance.

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