Market Orientation and Salesperson’s Performance in a Hierarchical Linear Modeling Approach

Abstract

Many marketing literatures identify market orientation (MO) as a key marketing philosophy for firms to establish their sustainable competitive advantages. Previous research also acknowledges the positive significant relationship of MO to firm performance. This paper extends the literatures by examining the cross-level effect of firm’s MO to an individual salesperson’s performance by using the Hierarchical Linear Modeling approach. The present study uses survey data from 152 sales personnel from 30 housing developers to evaluate the impact of firm’s MO to their performance. The result confirms all the MO dimensions having positive cross-level relationship to individual sales performance, except competitor orientation. Thus, the result suggests that the organization with higher MO, in terms of customer orientation, interfunctional co-ordination, profit orientation and responsiveness, the better the sales person performs.