Relationship between Market Orientation and Corporate Social Responsibility with special reference to Sri Lankan Financial Sector

Abstract

It is the role of the marketers to add value to the customers by identifying and fulfilling the needs and expectations of their customers. This process is known as market orientation. Meanwhile awareness of the social issues have increased among the society and customers in the past few decades. Therefore, society and customers expect marketers to be involved in socially responsible measures. Thus, it becomes necessary for the market oriented businesses to move towards corporate social responsibility to fulfill the social expectations of their customers and society. But so far no research has been carried out to analyze the relationship between market orientation and corporate social responsibility. Therefore, main purpose of this study is to investigate relationship between market orientation and corporate social responsibility. Hence findings of this study would be useful to the Sri Lankan financial sector to develop policies to foster socially responsible business behavior by improving their market orientation practices. This research was limited to the Sri Lankan financial sector which consists of banks and finance companies. Customer orientation, competitor orientation and inter-functional coordination are considered as the measurement variables of market orientation and it was derived from %arver and Slater (1990). Researcher adopted quantitative methodology and used structured questionnaires for data collection. Correlation analysis was used for data analysis. Results confirmed that there is a positive relationship between market orientation and CSR. From the findings it can be concluded that organization can improve its socially responsible business behavior by adopting market orientation practices.