A Note on Cultural Consistency within the Service Firm: The Effects of Employee Position on Attitudes toward Marketing Culture

Abstract

This study represents the beginning of an exploration of the internal constraints and barriers that stand in the way of successful strategy implementation within service organizations. A determination will be made if one of the internal constraints is perhaps the lack of consistency among employees regarding marketing practices, attitudes, values, norms, and ideals. Specifically, service firm employees' attitudes toward their actual and ideal marketing culture were measured. Attitudinal differences were examined between ground-level, middle-, and top-management employees from a cross-section of service industries. Significant differences were found for a variety of marketing culture components. Many of the differences remained even after removing possible effects of number of employees in the firm and age of the firm. Managerial implications are given.