- Title
- Impacts of internal market orientation (IMO) on innovation, autonomy and performance within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in service industry in Canada
- Creator
- Doroodgar Jorshery, Sahar
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Professional Doctorate - Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)
- Description
- The service sector is where services as intangible goods are provided to customers and it is comprised of different service industries such as warehousing, transportation, information, securities, investment, health care and social assistance, arts, entertainment, waste management, and all the other professional, technical and scientific services (Grossman, 2012). This sector is one of the main economic drivers of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member countries. In particular, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) operating in this sector stimulate innovation and provide employment opportunities. The high rate of business failures of SMEs, however, can be the consequence of the innovation management challenges. While recent studies suggest that Internal Market Orientation (IMO) is one of the solutions to overcome this challenge, few studies are found in the relevant literature. Consequently, this dissertation aims to fill this gap and to contribute to the scarce theoretical and empirical evidence on the relationships among IMO, innovation, autonomy and performance. This study seeks to evaluate the influence of innovation intensity and IMO on the financial and customer-related performance of businesses. The study also seeks to evaluate the mediating effect of autonomy on the association between IMO and innovation. This study has a cross-sectional, quantitative design. The business practices sampled in this study are from Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises that were operating in the Canadian service sector. This study used survey questionnaires from 99 SMEs to collect data. Later, structural equation modelling was applied to test the conceptual modelling of this study. The major findings of this study reveal that higher IMO enhances the innovative ability of organisations. Moreover, mediated by innovation, IMO affects financial and customer performance of business, however, the direct effect of IMO on performance is not substantiated. Another result of this study is related to autonomy. Results of this study show that, unlike the previous studies, autonomy did not affect innovation. Furthermore, this study result suggests that IMO and autonomy are not significantly correlated. The IMO-innovation relationship moderated by autonomy hypothesis was also rejected. In the end, the study provides support that SMEs need to continue developing innovation because it has a direct positive effect on their performance and it mediates the effects of IMO on organisational performance.
- Subject
- internal market orientation (IMO); innovation; performance; service sector; autonomy; Canada; small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); survey research; structural equation modelling
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1325715
- Identifier
- uon:25332
- Rights
- Copyright 2016 Sahar Doroodgar Jorshery
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 303 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |