The Analysis of Cognitive Moral in Bridging the Gap Between Internal Marketing and B2B Salespeople Performance

This study seeks to confirm and analyse the effect of cross-level cognitive morals on internal marketing and business sales force performance (i.e. behavioural performance and outcome performance). The concepts of relationship marketing and marketing theory of ethics underpin the relationship among variables. This study adopted a quantitative approach through a survey of 460 respondents from 13 company services and manufacturers. Internal marketing variables were measured at the unit level and tested using interrater agreement and the intraclass correlation. In contrast, the cognitive moral variables, behavioural performance, and sales force performance results were measured individually. Hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) was used to test the effect of the cross-level research variables. The results showed that internal marketing empirically supports cognitive morals. However, the effect of internal marketing does not support the two-dimensional performances of the sales force. Theoretically, the contributions, internal marketing and cognitive morals have shown the relationship between marketing and marketing theory of ethics.   Received: 28 April 2021 / Accepted: 15 July 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021