Dipl.-Stat. Christan Hoops, IPSOS Observer, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Michael Bücker, Ph.D., Technical University of Dortmund, 44221 Dortmund, Germany, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Abstract

Interaction orientation reflects the ability of a company to interact with the individual customer and to gather information from successful interactions. Four dimensions of interaction orientation are identified in the literature: customer concept, interaction response capacity, customer empowerment and customer value management (Ramani and Kumar, 2008). This study shows that indeed a fifth dimension of interaction orientation exists and investigates the determinants, moderators and consequences of this construct. The first notable finding is that B2B companies exhibit a greater degree of interaction orientation than B2C firms. Ramani and Kumar hypothesized that in their study. We show that there are B2C industries such as financial services, whose companies also have a greater interaction orientation. This could be the reason why the authors could not prove their hypothesis. Furthermore, we examine the influence of strategic orientations on organizational performances and compare various orientations with each other.

Keywords: adaptive selling, cook’s distance, customer-oriented selling, entrepreneurial orientation,  environment,  financial  services,  interaction  orientation,  learning orientation,  market  orientation,  organizational  culture,  organizational  strategy, organizational structures.