Date of Award

Spring 2008

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Program/Concentration

Business Administration-Marketing

Committee Director

Kiran Karande

Committee Member

John B. Ford

Committee Member

Anil Nair

Abstract

Globalization has promoted worldwide exporting levels to soar and to account for more than 10% of global activity. Technological advances in information and communication technologies, production methods, transportation, and international logistics have led to the increase in the exporting activity. However, these advances have also resulted in highly competitive and turbulent markets, and sophisticated and demanding customers, which in return has required exporting firms to be both entrepreneurial- and market-oriented.

A review of the market orientation, entrepreneurial orientation and exporting literature revealed three gaps that the dissertation sought to fill. First, the relationship between market orientation and entrepreneurship was not clear. Second although market and entrepreneurial orientations were seen as necessary requirements for long-term survival of the firms, these two orientations, their interactions and their performance implications had rarely been explored in the context of exporting. Third, ambiguous and conflicting findings existed in the literature on the performance implications of market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation.

Thus, the purpose of this dissertation was to integrate market and entrepreneurial orientation in the context of exporting by: (1) investigating the relationships between the different components of market and entrepreneurial orientations; (2) examining the link between both orientations and export performance, and identifying organizational, environmental and strategic contingency variables that moderate this link.

The model and hypotheses were tested with data collected from 150 export managers. Based on the analysis of the data results indicated that the three components of market orientation had different impact on the components of entrepreneurial orientation. For example, whereas customer orientation had a negative impact of proactiveness and risk-taking of an organization, competitor orientation had a positive impact. Similarly, although customer and competitor orientations had a negative impact on innovativeness, interfunctional coordination had a positive impact. Moreover, while market orientation positively impacted export performance, entrepreneurial orientations had no significant effect on export performance. Furthermore, the results revealed that the strength of the market orientation—export performance relationship did not change under different organizational and environmental conditions. Based on the study findings, managerial implications, study limitations and recommendations for future research are discussed.

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DOI

10.25777/dt0g-vk93

ISBN

9781109739893

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