Internal marketing and the internal customers' citizenship behavior in higher education

Service organizations are required to achieve sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) to ensure their competitive capability, whereas these organizations put their efforts into developing organizational culture in which internal and external customers are of equal importance. By implementing such a culture, organizations’ employees, as internal customers, realize their self-importance and, thus, the possibility of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) by them increases. For service organizations, because of higher level of contacts between external customers and employees (internal customers) OCB plays an important role in creating, achieving, and maintaining sustainable competitive advantage. The present study aims to investigate the effect of internal marketing on universities' internal customer citizenship behavior (ICCB) through their perceived value and satisfaction.

To analyze the hypotheses of this research, 405 employees of Iranian state universities were surveyed through a questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and Smart PLS 2 software.

The results demonstrate the effect of internal marketing on internal customers' OCB as well as mediating role of internal customers' perceived value and satisfaction in the relationship between internal marketing and internal customers' OCB.