Abstract
Marketing researchers have long been advocating the relevance of internal marketing for improving organisational performance in general. This is more so in service organizations for being more people-oriented. In this study, some of the typical internal marketing activities, those that perform a pivotal role in shaping contact employee desired behaviour at service encounter level, have been identified. The study matches perceptions from both the contact employees and their customers in several services setting like insurance, postal services, and banking in the Indian context. Specifically, the results reveal that desired change in several contact-employee job attitudinal responses (esprit de corps and service effort) and organisational subjective performance is positively explained by some of the internal marketing activities so identified in the study like perceived service standard communication, perceived supervisors support and perceived empowerment at the service encounter level. Additionally, the results report that these job attitudinal responses play a mediating role in between the causal relationships, thus connecting the positive effects of internal marketing activities to organisational performance. From the findings, internal marketing positively influences employee esprit de corps and service effort, organisations need to continuously monitor all the dimensions of internal marketing to improve their service delivery system and consequent performance.
Disciplinary: Management Science. (C) 2021 INT TRANS J ENG MANAG SCI TECH.