Promoting an Internal Market-Oriented Culture (IMOC) in Healthcare Services
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Promoting an Internal Market-Oriented Culture (IMOC) in Healthcare Services
Terje Slåtten, Gudbrand Lien, Ella Lupina, Knut Arne Gravingen
Received: 20 November 2019 / Accepted: 30 November 2019 / Published: 31 December 2019 © The Society of Service Science and Springer 2019
ABSTRACT It is essential for healthcare service organizations to develop and promote an organizational culture that focuses on their frontline employees. The aim of this study is to explore one such frontline-focused organizational culture concept, which is labeled as internal market-oriented culture (IMOC). The study examines both potential factors that promotes IMOC as well as potential outcomes of IMOC. The concept of IMOC was tested in a quantitative study were frontline employees in public hospitals participated. The findings reveal that both management focus on employees and interdepartmental cooperation promotes an organization’s IMOC. IMOC was found to have a direct effect on frontline employees’ overall job satisfaction and turnover intentions. In addition, the relationship between IMOC and employees’ turnover intentions was found to be mediated by employees’ job satisfaction. No previous research has focused on how to promote IMOC in healthcare services, which makes this study a unique contribution to service research. KEYWORDS Internal Market-Oriented Culture (IMOC), Turnover Intentions, Interdepartmental Cooperation, Frontline Employees, Healthcare Services, Management Terje Slåtten ( ), corresponding author Inland School of Business and Social Sciences, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway e-mail: [email protected] Gudbrand Lien Inland School of Business and Social Sciences, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway e-mail: [email protected] Ella Lupina Sykehuset Innlandet HF, 2381 Brumunddal, Norway e-mail: [email protected] Knut Arne Gravingen KoRus-Øst/Sykehuset Innlandet HF, 2312 Ottestad, Norway e-mail: [email protected]
158 Terje Slåtten, Gudbrand Lien, Ella Lupina, Knut Arne Gravingen
1. INTRODUCTION Healthcare organizations such as hospitals are characterized as highly knowledge-intensive institutions (Slåtten et al. 2019; Yanfang 2014) often denoted to as PSF or professional service firms (Liedtka et al. 1997). Specifically, healthcare services to patients are most often performed by either an individual specialist or a team of specialists within a particular knowledge-based discipline. Consequently, these specialists represent the “frontline” employees of hospitals, meaning that they use their specialist knowledge to produce or provide the best possible healthcare services to patients. Because this pure form of knowledge-based expertise is manifested in highly tailored services for each specific patient, it becomes both natural, and more correctly, essential, for healthcare organizations to strive to promote or orchestrate a culture and climate that, in the most positive way, “takes care of” these core resources for delivery of healthcare se
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