Ever since the 1960s, it has been argued that customer needs have to be a firm's core business purpose. One way for firm to achieve this, is through use of market orientation strategies. Recent research has found that shared leadership could have a positive effect on market orientation, as well as within top management teams. The ability that top management teams have to influence the organization, is further found to be effected by the level of discretion they operate within. This thesis seeks to explain the relationship between shared leadership within top management teams and market orientation, and how this relationship in turn might be contingent on perceived contextual discretion. This is done through a quantitative method, where a survey study is done on the top management teams in Swedish saving banks. The findings of this thesis show that shared leadership is positively related with market orientation, and that this relationship is not contingent on perceived contextual discretion. The variable of perceived contextual discretion was, however, found to have the effect of an independent variable with a strong positive direct effect on market orientation within the financial sector. One limitation of this thesis is that the statements for perceived contextual discretion has been developed only from concepts, and have not been tested in any previous study. This brings with it a risk that these statements did not measure the concept in the most optimal way. The theoretical contributions of this thesis are how perceived contextual discretion is found to have a direct effect on market orientation. This further imply that perceived contextual discretion has an effect on the level of market orientation within a firm.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hkr-18303 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Bruhn, Alina, Hesselroth, Marcus |
| Publisher | Högskolan Kristianstad, Avdelningen för ekonomi, Högskolan Kristianstad, Avdelningen för ekonomi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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