Communication Strategies and Marketing Performance: An Application of the Mohr and Nevin Framework to Intra-Organisational Cross-Functional Teams

Communication, and its key role in facilitating teamworking and knowledge management, is at the heart of research designed to understand the best approaches to managing teamwork and integration across functions and business partners. This understanding is necessary to improve the development of new products and services, and improve marketing efficiency. The research framework of Mohr and Nevin (1990) provides an interesting model, relating aspects of channel communication with channel performance, to achieve such improvements. Our model and hypotheses utilises Mohr and Nevin's unique framework as our starting point in examining the impact of communication strategy in intraorganisational cross-functional teams upon their team outcomes. We tested our model by collecting data from 42 organisational teams (237 respondents) and found that the model Mohr and Nevin proposed transfers well to the intra-organisational context. Our main finding supported the relationship between team communication behaviours and team performance. In addition, we found significant differences in this relationship depending upon the nature of the offer created by the industry (tangible good or intangible service) examined.