Emerald Article: Organizational structure and specialized marketing capabilities in SMEs Guilherme Trez, Fernando Bins Luce
Article information:
To cite this document: Guilherme Trez, Fernando Bins Luce, (2012),"Organizational structure and specialized marketing capabilities in SMEs", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 30 Iss: 2 pp. 143 - 164 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02634501211211957 Downloaded on: 05-05-2012 References: This document contains references to 65 other documents To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com This document has been downloaded 71 times.
Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by Shahid University of Beheshti For Authors: If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service. Information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Additional help for authors is available for Emerald subscribers. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com With over forty years' experience, Emerald Group Publishing is a leading independent publisher of global research with impact in business, society, public policy and education. In total, Emerald publishes over 275 journals and more than 130 book series, as well as an extensive range of online products and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 3 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.
*Related content and download information correct at time of download.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-4503.htm
Organizational structure and specialized marketing capabilities in SMEs
Guilherme Trez
College of Business Administration, UNISINOS, Sao Leopoldo, Brazil, and
Structure and specialized marketing 143
Received 3 January 2011 Revised 11 April 2011 Accepted 18 April 2011
Fernando Bins Luce
Business Administration School, UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to develop and test a conceptual model of organizational structure design that incorporates some factors influencing strategy implementation. The research also aims to consider inter-functionality in new product development (NPD) processes and marketing decisions, measured from the dispersion of these activities among functional areas. Design/methodology/approach – The research was conducted across 424 small and medium-sized furniture manufacturing companies. In total, eight hypotheses were proposed and tested using structural equation modeling. Findings – Most important among the study’s findings was that inter-firm relationships and inter-functional processes are relevant for the study of organizational structure design. It was found that the dispersion of the new product development process and of marketing decisions exert a positive influence on architectural marketing capabilities. The results showed that the dispersion of NPD processes and marketing decisions influence the development of marketing capabilities only in those companies with inter-firm relationships. The paper also found that inter-firm design did not affect the impact of the relationship between the dispersion of marketing decisions and NPD process on specialized capabilities. Research limitations/implications – The study focuses research on Brazilian small to medium-sized furniture enterprises and could have single-source bias in its data collection process. Practical implications – The findings provide insights into ways of integrating structures. It is observed that a higher integration of areas in marketing decisions is related to the dispersion of the NPD process. Given that dispersion in NPD is a