COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT AND THE ADOPTION OF CUSTOMER-ORIENTATION BEHAVIOUR: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Fletcher & Nusbaum (2010) suggest that, in organisations, the existence of a competitive climate among peers can influence the adoption of customer- or sales-oriented behaviours depending on the perception of threats or challenges. In this way, an organisation's guidelines, through its organisational culture, are able to reduce salesperson "role ambiguity and role conflict" and therefore impact on their performance through the adoption of customer-oriented behaviours. The transmission of customer-focused values will lead the salesperson to adopt customer-oriented sales behaviours (Schwepker, 2003). This research show the impact that the adoption of customer orientated or sales orientated behaviours might exert not only on performance in meeting fixed sales targets, but also on the performance achieved when the force of sales are perceived to have high average levels of competitive climate. The results show that a customer orientated sales force achieves increasingly better levels of performance when compared to the adoption of short term strategies geared towards applying sales pressure on potential clients.