The role of logistics in the market orientation process

by Fugate, Brian Scott.

The ability of an organization to provide customer value and generate profit depends on how well it understands and meets the true needs of its markets. The theory of market orientation captures the essence of discovering and responding to market needs. This dissertation reconceptualizes market orientation as a process, includes a more comprehensive set of behaviors of market orientation, and examines market orientation within the logistics function. Logisticians are particularly relevant to market orientation because of their increasing role in the organization as managers of supply chain relationships and as internal and external boundary spanners. The model was developed based on the literature in marketing, logistics, strategic management, organizational behavior, information processing, and knowledge management and data from in-depth interviews with logistics professionals. The nomological network consisted of five constructs: logistics market intelligence generation, logistics market intelligence dissemination, logistics market intelligence shared interpretation, logistics market intelligence responsiveness. Logistics performance was tested as a second-order construct in the model. The qualitative and empirical survey results reveal that shared interpretation is a mediator between market intelligence dissemination and responsiveness, the impact on performance is a result of market intelligence responsiveness, and the participation of logistics in MO positively impacts performance of the function and the organization as a whole. The absolute fit of the logistics market orientation model was good (RMSEA of .05, CFI of .95, ?2 = 1635.64, degrees of freedom of 931), and all five hypotheses tested were supported. v