Conceptual Development

Abstract

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of the conceptual foundations that lead to the construct development in Chapter 3 and the formulation of the hypotheses in Chapter 4. The first part of this chapter introduces the resource-based view of the firm as the theoretical background of this study and elaborates on the two dimensions of customer orientation, responsive customer orientation and proactive customer orientation. To gain a clearer understanding of how performance might be affected by proactive customer orientation, research that has been conducted in this field is reviewed in the second part. The third part of this chapter differentiates between the proactive customer-oriented climate and proactive customer-oriented processes based on evidence from specialized departments and insights from existing research, and finally the conceptual model is developed.