Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
A study of 156 managers finds that interfunctional coordination is important to marketing, manufacturing, and R&D performance. Interfunctional coordination also is highly correlated with collaboration - an affective aspect of interfunctional relationships. This latter finding contrasts the commonly discussed structural aspects of interfunctional relationships. Managerial and research implications are outlined.
INTRODUCTION
According to Narver and Slater (1990), market orientation has three behavioral components: customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination. Of these three components, marketing traditionally has emphasized the former two elements due to the discipline's inherent external, strategic focus on customers and competitors. Less attention has been paid to interfunctional coordination due to its internal, implementation focus (Hunt and Morgan 1995).
This is no way should suggest that interfunctional coordination is unimportant, however. As stated by Narver and Slater (1990, p. 22), "Given the multidimensional nature of creating superior value for customers, marketing's interdependencies with other business functions must be systematically incorporated in a business marketing strategy." In short, an internal focus may be just as deserving as an external focus.
But even if there is agreement that interfunctional coordination is an important consideration, there is disagreement over what interfunctional coordination represents. Narver and Slater (1990) characterize interfunctional coordination as "the coordinated utilization of company resources in creating superior value for target customers" (p. 22). The use of "coordinated" as part of the definition is not precise enough to determine what interfunctional coordination really means. Other authors have used the terms of interaction (e.g., Ruekert and Walker 1987), communication (e.g., Maltz and Kohli 1996; Fisher, Maltz, and Jaworski 1997), collaboration (e.g., Souder 1987), or integration (e.g., Gupta, Raj, and Wilemon 1986; Song and Parry 1993)to specify the nature of relationships between marketing and other functions. Are these terms equivalent? If not, how do they differ? And what are the implications of these for interfunctional coordination, market orientation, and performance?
The following study addresses these issues by attempting to better define interfunctional coordination, its role in the implementation of a market orientation, and its role in promoting business performance. In this paper, interfunctional coordination is first compared and contrasted to other terminology used to characterize interfunctional relationships in order to better distinguish interfunctional coordination. Next, interfunctional coordination's role in market orientation is discussed....