Internal marketing and its influence on workers’ satisfaction

This marketing research article focuses on internal market orientation (IMO) and its influence on the satisfaction of contact personnel of the bank industry.

It was written by the following associate professors at Business Administration and Marketing Department at Jaume I University: Vicent Tortosa Edo, Javier Sánchez García and Miguel Ángel Moliner Tena.

This paper is one of the articles that these authors have written about the Internal Market Orientation (IMO) variable and its inluence on the organisational results.

The main aim of the paper is to verify the dimensions, reliability and validity of internal market orientation (IMO) as a scale of measurement of internal marketing, and using it to measure the effect of internal marketing on the satisfaction of contact personnel.

Interviews were carried out with all the cashiers of the 16 branches of a small, local credit institution. Because of the small sample size, partial least squares were used in the analysis of the data. The results show the validity and reliability of the IMO construct, formed by four of the
five dimensions of the original scale. They also corroborate the causal relationships
among the four dimensions, as well as the significant influence of the informal
dimension of IMO on the satisfaction of contact personnel.

The main limitation of this study is that it analyses a single financial entity, with the characteristics and behaviours that the latter has in its relationship with its employees. To achieve their organisational objectives, firms must adopt an orientation towards the employee, or internal marketing, on an equal plane to the traditional consideration of the external
market. Also, the measurability of this internal orientation on the basis of the IMO
scale makes available a valuable tool of planning and control in its implementation.

This article verifies the validity and reliability of the IMO construct, and its
influence on the satisfaction of contact personnel, in a different business sector and
with a different research subject from those analysed hitherto by the literature. It
also demonstrates the sequential type of relationship among the dimensions that
form IMO.

Keywords: internal marketing; internal market orientation; stakeholder orientation;
satisfaction of contact personnel.

This paper was published on the The Service Industries Journal, Vol. 30, No. 8, July 2010, pp. 1279–1297.