Internal Market Orientation Adoption and New Service Development (NSD): Gearing up the internal performance of the NSD team

New service development (NSD) has received much attention in the pertinent literature. Yet the extant literature is rather silent when it comes to the drivers that explain the NSD team’s ability to successfully deliver the new service. Opening this line of investigation is clearly important because the outcome of the NSD effort is highly dependent on the NSD team’s performance. Using an eclectic theoretical approach, we rely on relevant management theories to develop and test a conceptual framework suggesting that the adoption of internal market orientation (IMO) influences the dynamics of the NSD team, which in turn impact on its performance by allowing the team to better use the kind and amount of resources the management allocated in the NSD effort. Using a hierarchical research design, we test this framework against 116 NSD managers and 543 NSD team members. The results demonstrate the importance of adopting IMO as a nomological antecedent to the NSD team’s ability to successfully deliver the new service. Scholars gain from this research as the study produces fresh insights of the importance the management of the NSD team has for new service success and the profound impact of IMO adoption. Practitioners equally benefit as this study demonstrates the benefits of IMO adoption to the company as a whole while they become more conscious of the need to lay stronger bridges between the two functions.