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Internal Relationship Management: Linking Human Resources to Market Performance

Posted on: Sunday, 2 April 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Ogilvie, John R

Michael D. Hartline and David Bejour (Editors). Internal Relationship Management: Linking Human Resources to Market Performance. Binghamton, NY: Best Business Books, 2004, 110 pages, $19.95, softcover.

Tearing down the functional silos to examine the integration between disciplines is a worthy goal espoused by this book. Addressing the interface between marketing and management, this selection of articles from a 2004 special issue of the Journal of Relationships Marketing seeks to examine an area that "remains understudied and underdeveloped in the marketing literature." Although the marketing field has often focused its attention outwardly on the customer, these articles look inward to examine linkages between management practices and marketing performance. The press release offers praises from one of the leaders in relationships marketing, Jagdish Sheth, saying, "This book is a very good effort toward linking human resources to marketing performance." I could not find much in the text related to human resource management, although a number of the variables studied, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and psychological contract, are familiar to the readers of Personnel Psychology.

This collection of articles builds on work in services marketing. Barry (1986) advocated that a major focus of the marketing area was to get the rest of the organization to practice marketing. Others (Greene, Walls, & Schrest, 1994) emphasized the role of internal marketing for external success. The services marketing triangle (Kotler, 2000) also stresses the role of employees and company practices in overall marketing success. Marketing staff are typically boundary spanners, interacting with customers in the environment frequently. Several of the articles note that the attitudes of these employees are readily communicated to customers and thus impact service quality, findings long noted by organizational researchers (e.g., Schneider, 1980).

As a collection of articles, there is no real sequence to the book. They can be read in any order. Four of the five articles report empirical research and one is a conceptual piece, thus my review feels more like discussant comments at a conference. Each of the empirical reports uses sound methodology and analyses. The biggest issue is whether this collection of articles adds value and is of interest to organizational researchers and practitioners.

I began with the conceptual article in the series titled, "A Conceptualization of the Employee Branding Process." Branding exercises are often part of strategic planning. Branding is a current focus for many organizations as it gives them a means of developing a clear identity that can be distinguished from the competition, providing an edge in the marketplace. The actions of employees in turn reinforce the brand. According to the authors, Miles and Mangold, "Employee brand-building behaviors may include courtesy, responsiveness, reliability, helpfulness, and empathy." They define employee branding as "the process by which employees internalize the desired brand image and are motivated to project the image to customers and other organizational constituents." Organizational scholars should be familiar with this concept, as it has now become part of the corporate lexicon.

What influences employee branding? Miles and Mangold identify two major sets of impacts. Messages, both internal and external, play a critical role. A number of human resource management (HRM) practices, such as training and performance management, are part of the internal message set. The consistency among these messages is repeatedly stressed. These messages in turn influence the psychological contract the employee has with the corporation. There is a long tradition in I-O psychology and organizational behavior related to socialization and organizational contracts. Mixed messages, too, are familiar as with Kerr's (1975) "On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B." The primary value of this article lies in introducing the concept employee branding. The model does not add much, especially of practical value. Despite frequent mention of consistency of messages, little is offered in the way of advice in how to be consistent. Consistency is often illusive for many organizational practices, more the ideal than common practice.

The first article in the series examines the early career experiences of boundary spanners or marketing staff. Marketing is clearly at the interface between the customer and the firm with marketing staff working in the external environment of firms. Thus, the early transition experiences of these employees will impact their attitudes and job success. The authors, Wood, Glew, and Street, hypothesize that positive and negative appraisal of experiences plays a role in this transition. Personal and nonorganizational factors, such as role centrality and sense of coherence, impacted the appraisal process. These variables do not represent issues that can be managed as they reflect individual differences of entering employees. Thus, the only application from this article is to make decisions based on these variables, an approach that is not warranted given the limited amount of data on the topic.

The second article, by Hartline and De Witt, discusses recruitment, selection, and retention practices. I found it interesting, but again, not very ground breaking. They studied hotel workers as service providers but not HRM practices directly. They examine the characteristics and attitudes within the sample and from the results inferred implications for HRM. The authors note that the typical service employee is younger, with less job and industry experience. They conclude that the best service employees were older with a great deal of industry experience. Hartline and De Witt note that this profile of employee is not common in service positions but did not resolve this discrepancy. Furthermore, they did not examine performance, but the attitudes of job satisfaction, commitment, self- efficacy, and stress.

The best article in the text is a focus on boundary spanners' satisfaction with support services by Stan, Landry, and Evans. The authors note that organizational support is critical for service positions, but customers do not understand support services provided to boundary spanners; hence, there are greater pressures on these employees. They emphasize the role of communication in addressing these challenges. Their study was based on a sample of 830 salespeople. Results indicate that management communication impacted perceptions of service quality and job satisfaction. The climate created for support services makes a difference in the attitudes of these boundary spanners.

The final paper in the series examines the internal customer mindset (ICMS) of a diverse set of marketing managers who were members of the American Marketing Association or on the mailing list of a marketing department in a university. Given the historical external focus of marketing staff, those with an internal mindset will have more positive attitudes and perform at higher levels. ICMS was hypothesized as a mediating variable between the attitudes of satisfaction and commitment with performance and turnover intention. They found that ICMS did partially mediate the relationship with performance but not with turnover intentions. Given the nature of the sample drawn from multiple organizations, all measures were at the individual level with no organizational assessment. For satisfaction and performance, there should be a fit between ICMS and the priorities and practices of companies in which employees work.

Returning to my original question, does this book have value to the readers of Personnel Psychology? The management of these internal relationships is relatively new in the marketing field but sounds rather familiar to psychology and organizational scholars. A few new concepts were introduced but no groundbreaking insights were evident. The book helps bridge disciplines and can illustrate for students how concepts can be applied across fields to other fields and subject populations.

I also found little value from a management viewpoint. The practical applications are few. Many of the variables studied were individual differences with few practices examined or even discussed. Even the link to HRM is limited. Only two of the five articles involve human resource practices. Most articles looked at satisfaction and commitment, concerns and outcomes of HRM but not systems, processes, or practices. Although cross-disciplinary research and integration holds the promise of new insights, this text provides limited worth for HRM and organizational behavior readers.

REFERENCES

Berry L. (1986). Big ideas in service marketing. Journal of Consumer Marketing, Spring, 47-51.

Greene WE, Walls GD, Schrest LJ. (1994). The keys to external marketing success. Journal of Services Marketing, 8(4), 5-13.

Kerr S. (1975). On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18, 769-783.

Kotler P. (2000). Marketing management, Millennium edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Schneider B. (1980, Autumn). The serviceorganization: Climate is critical. Organizational Dynamics, 9, 52-65.

Reviewed by John R. Ogilvie, Associate Professor of Management, Barney School of Business, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT.

Copyright Personnel Psychology, Inc. Spring 2006

Source: Personnel Psychology

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