Internal Marketing Strategy and Employee Performance

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence of internal marketing strategy on employee performance. More specifically, the study adopted the Greene et al (1994) domains of internal marketing such as: internal marketing promotion and reward systems as the predictor variable, while affective organizational commitment was adopted as the study moderating variable and employee performance as the criterion variable. The study adopted the quantitative research approach with the use of questionnaire instrument to elicit data from the target population; thereafter 150 employees were systematically selected from 10 service firms in the aviation sector located at the Port Harcourt International Airport of Nigeria; five insider contact men were used to distribute the questionnaire instrument. 126 units of the questionnaire were retrieved as used; the data generated were also analyzed using the Pearson Product moment Correlation Coefficient and Simple Regression with the support of SPSS version 18 to analyze the core data. Finding showed that internal marketing promotion has significant and positive impact on employee performance. Also, internal marketing reward systems showed a positive and significant impact on employee performance and a positive correlation was found between affective organizational commitment and employee performance. Therefore, this study has validated that internal marketing strategy is a strong tool for wining employee’s commitment to work especially in the Nigeria Aviation sector. , it recommend for the stakeholders and managers of firms in the Nigerian aviation industry to engage the internal marketing strategy to motivate its employees to be optimally productive. Also, the managers of the firm should play the transformational leadership roles to its employees rather than the transactional leadership style which has the possibility of declining employees work performance. However, the implication of implementing this study recommendations are that employees’ performance in terms of productivity will be enhanced. KEYWORDS: Internal Marketing; Affective Organizational Commitment; Internal Marketing Promotion; Reward Systems; Employee Performance; Aviation &Nigeri