5. Suggestions for future research and conclusions
Our study is one of the few (e.g., Olson, 1994; Olson et al., 1995; Olson, Walker Jr., Ruekert, & Bonner, 2001; Walker Jr. & Ruekert, 1987) that looks at how marketing interacts with other functional departments. Building upon this work, we believe additional insights for marketing managers and academics alike could be had by examining the policies included in this study in an examination of HR policies for sales managers and personnel. We note that Merit and Job-Based compensation scores did not tend to off-set one another. In other words, when high scores for one or the other of these measures appeared within fit companies pursuing a specific strategy (e.g., Low Cost Defender) we anticipated that the other measure would be low. But such was not always the case. We wonder if, for example, within Low Cost Defender firms that marketing personnel might be chiefly evaluated on tenure (i.e., Job-Based) where sales persons might be chiefly evaluated and compensated on sales (i.e., Merit-Based).
Despite these limitations, we believe our findings are in line with those of other researchers who have examined the relationship between Human Resource policies and business strategy (e.g., Balkin & GomezMejia, 1990; Snell & Dean Jr., 1992; Wright et al., 1994, 2001) and those who have examined marketing's role in the implementation of business strategies (e.g., Conant et al., 1990; Matsuno & Mentzer, 2000; McDaniel & Kolari, 1987; McKee et al., 1989; Olson et al., 2005; Slater et al., 2007; Slater & Narver, 1993; Slater & Olson, 2000, 2001, 2002; Varadarajan & Clark, 1994; Vorhies & Morgan, 2003, 2005; Walker Jr. & Ruekert, 1987). Thus, we are comfortable recommending that marketing and HR managers incorporate our findings into the processes they use to select, train, assess, and compensate marketing personnel.
