Title: Influence of mentoring in Market Orientation: an empirical investigation

Authors: Juan Gabriel Cegarra-Navarro, Daniel Jimenez-Jimenez

Addresses: Facultad de Empresa, Dpto. Organizacion de Empresas, Universidad Politecnica de Cartagena, Paseo Alfonso XIII, 50. C.P. 30203, Cartagena, Murcia, Spain. ' Facultad de Economia y Empresa, Dpto. Organizacion de Empresas, Universidad de Murcia, Campus de Espinardo. C.P. 30100, Espinardo, Murcia, Spain

Abstract: The term Market Orientation (MO) includes the ability of the organisation to generate, disseminate and use superior information about customers and competitors. Mentoring can be a powerful way of developing mentee insights, skills, values and beliefs. Therefore, mentoring interventions can help firms develop Intelligence Generation (IG), intelligence dissemination and intelligence responsiveness. This paper examines the explanatory power of mentoring on MO components through an empirical investigation of 69 SMEs in the Spanish Telecommunication sector using repeated measures ANOVA validated by factor analysis. The conclusions indicate that, although mentoring is a key factor to foster processes such as intelligence creation and intelligence responsiveness, other processes of MO as intelligence dissemination may occur in the absence of mentoring.

Keywords: market orientation; mentoring; intelligence creation; intelligence responsiveness; intelligence dissemination; SMEs; small and medium sized enterprises; Spain; telecommunications; knowledge productivity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMCP.2006.010266

International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy, 2006 Vol.2 No.2, pp.154 - 167

Published online: 12 Jul 2006 *

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