Measuring market orientation in nonprofit organizations

Past studies have shown that market orientation improves performance in nonprofit organizations. As a result, nonprofit practitioners’ and researchers’ interest in the theory of market orientation has been growing over the years. However, much less attention has been paid to developing a proprietary scale of market orientation in the nonprofit context. Previous studies have relied on the MARKOR scale with minor changes in its wordings to suit the nonprofit context. Synthesizing B. Shapiro’s (1973. Marketing for nonprofit organizations. Harvard Business Review, 51(5), 223 – 232) dual target-customer perspective with J. Narver and S. Slater’s (1990. The effect of a market orientation on business profitability. Journal of Marketing , 54(2), 20 – 35) view of market orientation, P. Modi and D. Mishra (2010. Conceptualising market orientation in non-profit organisations: Definition, performance, and preliminary construction of a scale. Journal of Marketing Management, 26, 548 – 569) offered a conceptualization of market orientation in nonprofit organizations (MONPO), and constructed a preliminary scale to measure it. This paper refines the preliminary MONPO scale and constructs a parsimonious, valid, and psychometrically versatile confirmatory scale using data from 579 nonprofit organizations engaged in delivering community services. Social desirability and method biases do not seem to adversely affect the finalized MONPO scale.