How much does organization performance influenced from marketing's internal legitimacy and accountability?(The case study of the productive brand owner firms)

Consensus exists in the academic and business experts regarding the growing challenges in the status of the marketing department within the organization. Practitioners and academics suggest that the department does not get enough acknowledge elements from the upper echelon due to its lack of accountability and internal legitimacy, despite its pivotal role in influencing the company's strategic direction. The aim of this study is explaining the relationship between the marketing's accountability and internal legitimacy by the firm performance. The methodology of the current study is a kind of descriptive-correlational one. The data collection instrument is a researcher-made questionnaire including a five-choice-range of Likert which has been distributed among the statistical sample of 315 of the middle managers and the employees of 35 brand owner firms in the clothing, home appliances, audio-visual, and furniture industries. The collected data has been analyzed using the structural equations modeling. The obtained results of the study indicated that the internal accountability of the marketing segment has a significant positive effect on the internal legitimacy and consequently its performance. More precisely, by increasing the marketing's accountability, the legitimacy of that segment has increased among other segments and this caused the firm performance improvement. However, the significant positive effect of the marketing's legitimacy on the willingness to collaborate and share knowledge with the mentioned segment has been confirmed, only the willingness to collaborate indicated its significant positive effect on the firm performance.