Essay about Management: Marketing and Inter-firm Relationships

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Marketing Intelligence & Planning
Emerald Article: Organizational structure and specialized marketing capabilities in SMEs Guilherme Trez, Fernando Bins Luce

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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.

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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