Engendering a Market Orientation: Exploring the Invisible Role of Leaders’ Personal Values

With the emergence of a ‘second generation of market orientation’, the topic has become a rich field for researchers to cultivate. Though marketing scholars have turned their attention to the critical role top leaders play in shaping and creating a market oriented organization, no research to date has considered the impact of leaders’ personal values in the process of engendering a market orientation. We argue that personal values, the primary driver of motivation, fundamentally determine human behavior. The objective of this study is to fill the gap in the current literature by systematically exploring the relationship between the two constructs. In this paper, a series of propositions is derived which suggests that leaders with different sets of personal values tend to emphasize different dynamics of market orientation. Consequently, we postulate that personal values play an invisible yet powerful role in impeding or facilitating the development of a market orientation. This research leads to an important implication for managers: a more balanced market-orientated approach can be achieved if managers become more aware of the personal values they possess.