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Abstract
Organizational leaders are spearheading change as an engine to reshape corporate cultures for novel purposes, redefining the significance and meaning of generating value through customer-oriented companies, emphasizing what is most important and relevant to customers. Capitalizing on the value of customer-orientation entails attention toward continuously improving it. The purpose of this study is to explore and explain the dynamics of increasing customer-orientation as an organizational change in a business-to-business technology company setting from the perspective of organizational leaders.
By engaging change leadership experts through a grounded theory qualitative research approach, the study resulted in a substantive theory with a set of propositions and framework offering a contextual understanding of customer-orientation change for managerial and scholarly use. The results help advance multi-disciplinary marketing, leadership, and organizational change research associated with the customer-orientation definition and the nature of the leadership mechanisms to affect the change.
The resulting theoretical propositions suggest that the organizational change to increase customer-orientation encompasses an aspirational organizational culture shift, an amplification of short and long-term customer value, and continuous adaptation through a management system. The analysis revealed that leaders steer the complex change by adopting second-order organizational orientations involving organizational culture and customer value. The culture-oriented changes center around increasing organizational alignment, agility, and engagement to shape a customer-oriented company. The customer value-oriented shifts focus on building trust, applying a user lens, and creating a 360-learning environment to generate higher customer and business value. Using a change theories lens, the results indicated that increasing customer-orientation entails leading the organization through an interplay of diverse change process modes balancing social construction and prescribed regulation.