Building competitive advantage through market orientation: a strategic solution for LCSB in the new European Union banking environment.

This project focuses on the changes the Limassol Co-operative Savings Bank (LCSB) must make to become more market oriented and halt its recent performance decline. A higher level of market orientation (MO) correlates positively with sales and market share growth (Narver and Slater 1990). According to Jaworski and Kohli (1993) MO builds on three dimensions: the organisation-wide acquisition, dissemination and response to market intelligence-behaviours enabled by structures and systems called Antecedents. Thus, making LCSB more market oriented amounts to a cultural change typically influenced by individuals values. In order to assess LCSB’s current degree of MO, two sets of questionnaires were administered to LCSB’s work force (the Employee Group and the Management Group: Jaworski and Kohli’s (1993) Antecedents and Moderators and Kohli, Jiaorski and Kumar’s (1993) MARKOR on the one hand and Schwartz’ (2003)Porttrait Valuew Questionnaire (PVQ) on the other. Working on the Realism paradigm, the triangulated results show LCSB’s weak MO drive in all aspects of organisational life, so the Recommendations prioritise changes in the Antecedents’ area and advocate the creation of an Internal Customer-Supplier network. Two action plans are drawn: one for the management’s role in initiating, enforcing and monitoring structural and systematic changes and one for the employees’ role in acquiring new skills and overcoming learning anxiety. Financial constraints and the challenges of cultural change suggest the lengthly but feasible progress pf LCSB towards more MO ind improved performance.