Professional Documents
Culture Documents
American Marketing Association
American Marketing Association
American Marketing Association
Analysis
Author(s): Rohit Deshpandé, John U. Farley and Frederick E. Webster, Jr.
Source: Journal of Marketing, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 23-37
Published by: American Marketing Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1252055 .
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CorporateCulture, Customer
Orientation,
and Innovativeness
in
Japanese Firms: A Quadrad
Analysis
"Quadrads" (double dyads) of interviews, each conducted with a pair of marketing executives at a Jap-
anese vendor firm and a pair of purchasing executives at a Japanese customer firm, provided data on
corporate culture, customer orientation, innovativeness, and market performance. Business performance
(relative profitability, relative size, relative growth rate, and relative share of market) was correlated pos-
itively with the customer's evaluation of the supplier's customer orientation, but the supplier's own as-
sessment of customer orientation did not correspond well to that of the customer. Japanese companies
with corporate cultures stressing competitiveness (markets) and entrepreneurship (adhocracies) outper-
formed those dominated by internal cohesiveness (clans) or by rules (hierarchies). Successful market
innovation also improved performance.
SEVERAL interconnected lines of recent concep- for creating a customer-focused, market-driven enter-
tual thinking and empirical analysis relate mar- prise (Houston 1986; Shapiro 1988; Webster 1988).
keting management to overall business strategy. Three Second, the management literatureis peppered with
related developments indicate a need to integrate these studies of organizational culture, often involving cross-
lines of research. national comparisons of American, European, and
First, managers are returning to the dictum of the Japanese firms (Davis 1984; Deal and Kennedy 1982;
so-called "marketing concept," with its call for cus- Hofstede 1980). In the field of organizational behav-
tomer orientation and innovation as the focus for all ior, rigorous theoretical analysis has been developed
business planning and strategy. Several recent studies and applied to understanding organizational cultures
and articles document renewed management concern (Ouchi 1980; Smircich 1983). Toward the end of the
1980s, the marketing discipline not only became aware
RohitDeshpande is Professorof Marketing andFrederickE.Webster, of organizational culture as a field of study, but also
Jr.,is E.B.Osborn Professorof Marketing,AmosTuckSchoolof Busi- began to develop a related research agenda (Deshpand6
ness Administration,Dartmouth College.JohnU. Farleyis Director, and Webster 1989).
JosephH.Lauder Institute
of Management &International and
Business, Third, there has been heightened interest in mea-
IraA. Lipman TheWharton
Professor, School,TheUniversityof Penn-
sylvania.Theauthorsareindebted to the MarketingScienceInstitute suring and understanding business performance, es-
forseedsupportof thisproject; to Procter&Gamble, ColumbiaBusi- pecially as it relates to market share, product quality,
ness School,andthe TuckAssociatesProgram forfinancial
support; sources of competitive advantage, and industry struc-
andto the International
Universityof Japanforadministrativeandfi- ture (Buzzell and Gale 1987; Porter 1980, 1985). Even
nancialassistance.
GeorgeFieldsandhisstaffatASI,particularly Mari more recently, marketing scholars have begun to ex-
Iwaki, wereinstrumentalin making theprojectwork.Theauthorsalso
to Stewart
expressgratitude Black
andJohnNarver, whoprovided plore the intersection of the marketing concept and
many business performance (Jaworski and Kohli 1992; Kohli
helpfulsuggestionson a previousdraftof thisarticle.
and Jaworski 1990; Narver and Slater 1990, 1991).
Journal of Marketing
Vol. 57 (January 1993), 23-27 QuadradAnalysisof Japanese Firms/ 23
24 / Journalof Marketing,January1993
FIGURE1
A Model of Organizational Culture Types'
TYPE:Clan TYPE:Adhocracy
DOMINANT ATTRIBUTES: DOMINANT ATTRIBUTES:Entrepreneurship,
Cohesiveness, participation, creativity,adaptability
teamwork,sense of family
LEADERSTYLE: Entrepreneur,innovator,
LEADERSTYLE:Mentor,facilitator, risktaker
parent-figure
BONDING:Entrepreneurship,
flexibility,risk
BONDING:Loyalty,tradition,
interpersonalcohesion STRATEGIC EMPHASES:Towardinnovation,
growth,new resources
STRATEGIC EMPHASES:Toward
developinghumanresources,
commitment,morale
Quadrad
Analysisof JapaneseFirms/25
26 / Journalof Marketing,January1993
28 / Journalof Marketing,
January1993
Quadrad
Analysisof JapaneseFirms/ 29
in both structural and cultural forms in Japanese or- The results are consistent with the analysis of the means
ganizations that is seldom mentioned in more popular reported in Table 1, but in a ceteris paribus sense.
writing. Five of seven measures have significant dif- Culture. The coefficients of the four culture types
ferences for high and low performers-three of four
order as expected, supporting Hi. Market cultures are
culture scales, the customer orientation measure pro-
associated with the best performance, followed by ad-
vided by the customer, and the innovativeness scale.
The two measures not significantly different for high hocracy cultures. Both clan and hierarchical cultures
are associated with poor performance, the latter being
and low performers are the clan culture scale and the
worst as hypothesized. The univariate tests are sig-
marketers' self-rating on customer orientation. We say
nificant for the market and hierarchical cultures and
more about each of these results subsequently. The
the others barely miss being significant because of the
results in Table 1 are not significantly different by major
relatively small sample size.
industry classifications of consumer goods, industrial
goods, and services, or by the extent of participation Customer orientation. The marketers' customer
in international business. orientation as reported by customers is related posi-
tively to business performance (H2b) and the cus-
The Discriminant Function tomers' perceptions are significantly more important
We used a discriminant function to classify high and than the marketers' own perceptions (H3b). In fact,
low performers (the binary performance variable dis- there is only weak agreement (correlation of .17, p <
cussed previously) on the basis of culture, customer .13) between the customers' and the marketers' per-
orientation, and innovativeness. This approach also ceptions of customer orientation, so H3a is not sup-
enables us to make meaningful managerial conclu- ported. The extremely low correlation between the
sions about the nature of our findings. Table 2 shows marketers' perceptions and performance (.00, p < .988,
the correlation of each explanatory variable with the Table 1) also leads to rejection of H2a.1
discriminant function-essentially the partial corre-
lation of each variable with the performance index. 'It is interesting to speculate on whether clan cultures have greater
TABLE 2
Makeup of the Discriminant Function
Pooled Within-GroupCorrelations
of Function and Independent Variable P-Value for Univariate F-Test
Culture
Market .48 .046
Adhocracy .39 .102
Clan -.28 .239
Hierarchical -.56 .021
Customer Orientation
Measured from customer .52 .031
Measured from producer .00 .988
Innovativeness .52 .034
30 / Journalof Marketing,January1993
Quadrad of Japanese
Analysis Firms
/ 31
32 / Journalof Marketing,
January1993
Appendix
Measures and Operationalizations
Customer Orientation
The statements below describe norms that operate in businesses. Please indicate your extent of
agreement about how well the
statements describe the actual norms in your business.
1 2 3 4 5
Strongly Neither Agree Strongly
Disagree Disagree Nor Disagree Agree Agree
QuadradAnalysisof JapaneseFirms/33
Culture
[The four culture scores were computed by adding all four values of the A items for clan, of the B items for adhocracy, of the
C items for hierarchy, and of the D items for market. The results, reported in Table 1, can therefore equal more or less than 100,
which would be the result only if respondents distributed points equally on each question. The scale was adapted from Cameron
and Freeman (1991) and Quinn (1988).]
These questions relate to what your operation is like. Each of these items contains four descriptions of organizations. Please
distribute 100 points among the four descriptions depending on how similar the description is to your business. None of the
descriptions is any better than any other; they are just different. For each question, please use all 100 points. You may divide
the points in any way you wish. Most businesses will be some mixture of those described.
34 / Journalof Marketing,January1993
Performance
Relative to our businesses' largest competitor, we are:
(1) (2) (3)
(a) Less profitable About equally profitable More profitable
(b) Larger About the same size Smallera
(c) Have a larger market share About the same market share Have a smaller market sharea
(d) Are growing more slowly Are growing at about the same rate Are growing faster
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