The influence of organic organizational cultures, market responsiveness, and product strategy on firm performance in an emerging market

Organizational culture is a strategic resource that influences a range of activities within firms, and empirical evidence from management and marketing demonstrates that it impacts performance. In this study, we investigate how organic types of organizational culture (i.e., adhocracy and clan) serve as a strategic resource to influence marketing effectiveness and performance in an emerging economy, using an extended form of the resource-based view as our theoretical framework. We posit that organic cultures, which are relatively dominant in emerging-nation firms, serve as antecedents of competitive advantage and superior performance. We selected China as the context to test the veracity of our model and use multiple informants and archival performance data to minimize common method variance. Our results support the proposed model and demonstrate that organic cultures impact market responsiveness, while confirming the critical roles of market responsiveness and product strategy change in producing superior performance. We further demonstrate a direct effect between clan culture and product strategy change, in addition to its indirect effect. Importantly, our results uncover that, although individually either adhocracy or clan culture can significantly improve the firm's responsiveness, their combined effect does not enhance market responsiveness; that is, their interaction yields a negative coefficient. Additionally, the influence of organic cultures on market responsiveness varies across different industry types. These important differences, along with theoretical contributions and managerial implications of our findings, are discussed, and several avenues for future research are proposed.