The moderating role of managerial ties in market orientation and innovation: An Asian perspective

a r t i c l e i n f o This empirical study contributes to the extant literature by investigating the relations among market orientation, managerial ties and innovation simultaneously and interactively, from an Asian perspective. Our findings reveal that customer orientation and interfunctional coordination have a positive impact on innovation. Moreover, managerial ties play a moderation role in the market orientation–innovation linkage. Business ties enhance the relation between customer orientation and interfunctional coordination and innovation. On the other hand, business ties and competitor orientation have a negative interaction effect on innovation. In addition, political ties also dampen the relation between interfunctional coordination and innovation. Such results add new insights to the extant literature and provide implications for future research and marketing practices in Asia. In the past decades there has been a growing interest in investigating the relation between a firm's market orientation and innova-A review of the extant literature that examines the relation between MO and innovation also reveals a cultural bias towards more economically developed countries and Western in-dividualistic cultures (Ellis, 2006). Grinstein's (2008) meta-analysis, for example, suggests that more than 80% of the studies were based on samples from developed countries, mostly Western individualistic societies. Given that MO is regarded as a form of organizational culture (Slater & Narver, 1995), which is often shaped by national cultures, there is a need to integrate MO and innovation research with underlying cultural factors (Marketing Science Institute, 1990). Indeed, the theories about corporate culture and innovation that have evolved in the context of Western cultural values and institutions may not readily apply to other cultures. It is important to examine the relation between MO and innovation in non-Western settings. Considering the growing importance of emerging markets in Asian countries and the role of innovation in Asian firms competing in the global market, this study focuses on understanding the MO–innovation relation from an Asian perspective. In this study the unique features rooted in Asian business cultures, such as guanxi and managerial ties, are incorporated into our research framework, because these features are the most noticeable factors that differentiate firms across different Empirical evidence shows that adequate guanxi networking or managerial ties can help firms to achieve their innovation objectives (Su, Tsang, & Peng, 2009) and facilitate the implementation of market orientation (Chung, 2011). While previous studies have found empirical supports for the role of managerial ties in influencing business …