Moderating Role of Customer Orientation on the Link between Market Oriented Behaviors and Proactive Service Performance among Relationship Managers in the Business Banking Industry

Banking is one of the main sections of the service sector where knowledge and human capital are considered the vital strategic asset, apart from loans and infrastructure. Nevertheless, recent development such as the liberalisation of the service sector and the tightening of capital requirements has spurred competitive pressures, particularly in the Malaysian scenario. Focusing on business-to-business (B2B) banking as opposed to retail banking, business banking sector's performance relies heavily on the individual roles of relationship managers or RMs, who act as the liaison for their clients pertaining to their financing activities. The RM's abilities to persistently conduct sound credit risk management while maintaining healthy asset growth are particularly dependent on their ability to manage customer knowledge that they possess. Such persistent behaviour is referred to as proactive service performance, in which employees’ outcome exceeds the expectations of customers and supervisors. The impact of customer knowledge management on service performance among RMs is indeed a matter of practical interest among bankers, yet it is theoretically underrated in the academia. Market orientation and customer knowledge, although not entirely new, are often researched in organisational contexts. However, being relevant to the marketing literature, empirical studies pertaining to individual customer knowledge behaviour are often given less attention. Therefore, this concept paper intends to narrow this gap by proposing a model of individual market orientation, customer orientation and proactive service performance. In the model, the concepts of individual market orientation and proactive service performance are elaborated, followed by hypotheses that propose linkages between the variables of each construct. Subsequently, the suggested practical implications provide managers and human resource experts with insights on how to enhance their sales performance particularly in the individualised financial service context.