Antecedents of internal marketing practice: some preliminary empirical evidence

Purpose – Service employees are reported to influence negatively the development of a market orientation hindering thus the service company's effort to become more customer centric. A way to overcome this barrier is the implementation of internal marketing (IM) programs. However, the extant literature reports that the number of companies practicing marketing internally is disproportionate small compared to the number of companies trying to adopt the market orientation concept. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to offer a preliminary insight regarding the antecedents of practicing marketing internally.Design/methodology/approach – To do this, data were collected from 583 first‐line personnel from 29 five and four stars hotels in Greece through personal interviews in order to investigate the impact of company culture and internal‐market orientation (IMO) as antecedents of IM and investigate the effect that the company's culture, IMO and IM have on employee's job satisfaction at the individual's level.Find...