Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, testing the relationships between internal marketing and employee satisfaction; second, investigating the links between employee satisfaction and perceived organizational performance; and finally, testing the relationship between internal marketing and perceived organizational performance. Design/methodology/approach: – Data were collected from 419 employees working in 53 microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Kivu (DR Congo). Data processing was performed using structural equations modeling through LISREL 9.1. Findings: – The results revealed that there is a positive and significant relationship between internal marketing and employee satisfaction. The results also revealed that there is a positive and significant relationship between internal marketing and perceived organizational performance. However, no significant relationship between employee satisfaction and perceived organizational performance was identified. Research limitations/implications: – There is a need to conduct a large qualitative survey aiming to understand why MFIs apply internal marketing and marketing practices in general. The results from such a study would serve to prepare a global quantitative study, which integrates in the same model internal marketing, external market orientation, employee job satisfaction (EJS), and organizational performance. Practical implications: – Results invite MFIs managers to change their mind and focus more on their employees. In fact, employees generate the most cost in general but they can also contribute to sustain growth and profitability. This is possible if they are better rewarded for their efforts. Originality/value: – This study links internal marketing, EJS and perceived performance in a sector and country which have been less or not studied in the marketing sector.

Purpose: This paper has two purposes. First is to operationalise the concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and trust in the context of a developing country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Second purpose is to test in a disaggregated perspective the impact of each CSR dimension on trust. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from 264 customers of six banks and processed with exploratory, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equations using LISREL 9.1. Findings: CSR is found to have five dimensions: legal responsibility, social needs responsibility, product responsibility, environmental responsibility and employee responsibility; trust is found to be a three-dimensional construct: integrity, compassion and partnership. Each CSR dimension has a positive impact on customers' perception of trustworthiness. Research limitations/implications: Reliability of trust is not high enough, suggesting the need to deepen research in order to find a more adapted CSR scale for banks. The smallness of sample size might have influenced the robustness of our psychometric results. CSR and trust relationships might be analysed in a more enriched framework including service quality, reputation and banks' employee performance as moderating variables. This paper has measured the two concepts from the customers' perspective only. However, both CSR and trust are best understood in a stakeholder perspective. So, it might be insightful to extend future research in a stakeholder orientation perspective. Practical implications: Banks from developing countries are also concerned with CSR and should invest in it. Clearly, each dimension of CSR should receive enough importance if Congolese banks are to recover their customers' trust. The findings of the study also suggest that banks' customers are aware of the necessity for banks to comply with the country's legislation. Non-compliance can have severe influence on customers' trustworthiness to banks. Social implications: Financial institutions are generally evaluated through financial indicators. The findings suggest that banks customers and other stakeholders begin a shift towards requiring their banks to invest in social and environmental activities in order to improve their local milieu. These aspects are still very neglected, or adopted only as marketing strategies to improve image, without a true willingness to be socially responsive. Originality/value: The two concepts are measured in a context where they did not receive enough importance (developing country), hence providing new knowledge in the field. Further, a disaggregated approach allowed understanding the way each CSR dimension impacts trust, which had not been the case in previous research.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to encourage the development of a research stream on the market orientation concept in higher education. Specifically, the author explains why this concept has emerged as a potentially relevant strategy to manage higher educational institutions. The paper raises the main problems surrounding the use of market orientation in higher education, and thereby, suggests an extensive research agenda which is expected to improve the importation of marketing concepts in higher education. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on an extensive critical literature review on market orientation, and a document analysis to grasp the major changes that have affected higher education institutions' context since the middle of the 1980s. A bulk of research agenda is proposed and summarised in a table. The different topics are rooted in the link the author has attempted to put between marketing theory and higher educational context. Findings – Research on market orientation in higher education still has many rooms to explore. These are: competition, quality issues, the impact of budget cuts on marketing implementation and market orientation operationalisation, etc. Originality/value – While the market orientation strategy has been widely studied in commercial sector, its use in public and non-profit sector such as higher education is still unsatisfactory. The paper: points on the limits of conceptual transpositions; discusses why market orientation is important to face the new context of higher education; and raises a number of research directions that have tremendous promises in the endeavour to build richer theories of marketing management, and to address significant problems of marketing practice in higher education.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), entrepreneurship in the agriculture sector remains for youth a key pillar for income creation. However, few are attracted by agribusiness despite stakeholders’ efforts toward engaging youth in agriculture. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between entrepreneurial potential characteristics and youth desirability to start an enterprise in agriculture among 514 young people in Eastern DRC. This study revealed that youth in South Kivu have different entrepreneurship potential features and agribusiness desirability levels according to their gender and living area. Hence, the youth’s agribusiness desirability is motivated by an awareness of emerging agripreneurial activities, land ownership, parent involvement in farming activities as a role model, perceived agribusiness as an employment source, management-organizing and opportunistic competencies, market analysis, negotiating, and planning skills. Therefore, efforts to attract youth into agribusiness should focus on the use of media, the creation of awareness of available agribusiness initiatives in their area, and the setup of land policy. This is in addition to putting in place capacity-building programs on entrepreneurial and business skills through incubators, and the formalization of youth agribusiness groups that foster capitalizing experiences between new and accelerated agripreneurial enterprises, with the support of parents and financial institutions, focusing on gender sensitivity, in both rural and urban areas.

In this paper, we provide new empirical evidence to the relationships between leadership styles (LS) and organizational performance, introducing gender as moderator variable. Data have been collected in two Congolese towns (Bukavu and Goma); an African post-conflict region dominated by very small family businesses that have not received enough attention. Combining exploratory factor analysis with a multivariate regression we found three main results. First, both leadership and performance are confirmed to be multidimensional. LS comprised participative/democratic leadership, and autocratic/directive leadership, while performance has three dimensions: employee efficiency/productivity, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction/retention. Second, the autocratic leadership is the more adopted both by men and women, with a slight non-significant difference for men. Although democratic leadership is underscored, it appears to be more adopted by women with significant difference. Third, controlling for other variables, only participative/democratic leadership styles have positive impact on SMEs’ performance, while autocratic leadership does not influence it. This implies that, in the growing competition facing SMEs, managers should adopt leadership style that allows their employees to internalize the firm’s objectives and to be committed. Also, our research confirms that women have much to give in managing enterprises, as they appear to be stronger in leadership styles, which have more impact on main dimensions of firms’ performance. Moreover, our results suggest new avenues for deeper research about leadership styles in family-owned enterprises.