How can internal marketing practices help achieve organizational success?

Abstract

Internal marketing is a concept still little recognized and disseminated, with most of the research on this area of marketing focusing on the service sector and well-consolidated and industrialized markets. This article sheds light on the importance of internal marketing practices by identifying their impact on workers’ proactive behavior and life satisfaction while observing the effects of affective commitment and job satisfaction. The study collected 428 valid questionnaires from Portuguese workers (218 in the private sector and 210 in the public sector) and applied structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses. The results showed how adopting an internal marketing perspective can contribute to successful organizational and human resource management. It was observed that internal marketing practices lead to affective commitment and job satisfaction in both the private and public sectors, although more pronounced in the private sector. Also, the findings pointed out that the workers’ affective commitment leads to adopting proactive behavior and life satisfaction only in the public sector and that job satisfaction leads to proactive behavior and life satisfaction for workers of both the private and public sector. This study contributes to increasing understanding of internal marketing, its applicability, and its importance for workers and organizations. Additionally, comparing the private and public sectors helps understand and show how this practice matches the workers’ expectations.