The Effect of Corporate Culture and Market Orientation on Iranian Industrial SMEs’ Performance

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the simultaneous effect of Corporate Culture and market orientation on the performance of small to medium-sized industrial manufacturing firms. To this end, a cross-sectional survey and variance based structural equation modeling was used for testing the hypotheses. The samples were selected based on a stratified sampling of commodity and specialty industries and consisted of 392 executives and marketing managers of Iranian industrial SMEs. The results show that the classical route among corporate culture- market orientation-customer performance- financial performance was significant and positive. The direct impact of market orientation and Corporate Culture on financial performance was not confirmed. The value of the paper is to provide unique knowledge about the effect of Corporate Culture and market orientation in small to medium-sized businesses against other larger organizations.