An assessment of the dimensions and the stability of items in the markor scale

Abstract

The MARKOR instrument for the measurement of market orientation has received considerable attention in recent literature. This paper reports the results of two studies: one a mail survey of large service firms in the UK and one from Malta consisting of personal interviews with marketing managers from a range of firms from all sectors. The three hypotheses in Kohli, Jaworski and Kumar {1993) result in five alternative models of the dimension structure of the market orientation construct. These are tested using confirmatory factor analysis in LISREL This is followed by a reduction process to investigate the stability of the items in the final MARKOR scale. The results obtained are similar to those of the developers of the instrument and the model consisting of a general factor and three orthogonal dimensions is found to offer the best fit in relative terms. However in absolute terms the fit obtained is rather limited. Additionally the factor loading patterns and in particular the results of the reduction process indicate that the individual items perform differently across the different samples. These findings appear to suggest that MARKOR may lack generalisability across industries, economies and cultures and more fundamentally the conceptualisation on which it is based may need to be reassessed.