Model of the relationship between internal marketing and customer orientation with the mediating role of work motivation of General Sport and Young offices employments of west provinces of Iran

In a world that is constantly changing and evolving, most organizations and companies are looking for ways to increase their competitive advantage, and one of these ways is moving towards improvement in providing services to customers; Therefore, organizations usually try to provide more facilities to customers and solve their needs faster. But smart and forward-thinking organizations reconsider the way they behave and communicate with their employees before taking any action, and in the first step, they keep them satisfied. Employees are the most important asset and capital of an organization, and the lack of suitable and good employees to provide services will cause many problems for organizations in today's competitive environment. This can be seen more clearly in service organizations. Attention to internal marketing was raised for the first time in 1980. The meaning of internal marketing is to look at employees as customers and jobs as internal products, which leads to satisfying the needs and desires of internal customers in the way of achieving organizational goals. In this regard; the motivational factors of employees are among the factors that play a great role in creating and developing the innovation of people in the organization. Nowadays, customer retention is important in sports service organizations, and if customer orientation is not the priority of these organizations, sports customers will not be retained, and if customers are not retained, the sports needs of the society will not be met and will be threatened. It can be Customers are the most important part of service organizations and in sports organizations such as sports complexes, customer retention depends on customer orientation in these organizations. If the management along with the employees of the sports organizations are not customer-oriented, the interaction between the customers and the organization will be limited. In this regard Tahamtan et al., 2023; In their research findings, they stated that green products positively affect the green image, green satisfaction, green trust and green loyalty of customers. Although the existing researches have examined the relationship between internal marketing and customer orientation, what is clear is that considering the importance of customer orientation for the survival of organizations and the tremendous effect of internal marketing and employee motivation. Therefore, it is felt necessary to carry out extensive research, especially in the field of sports, and therefore, in this research, an attempt has been made to find out the relationship between internal marketing and customer orientation with the mediating role of the work motivation of the employees of the general sports and youth departments of the western provinces. The country should be explained in order to reach a more complete and comprehensive understanding of the effect of internal marketing on the customer orientation of employees; Because the use of structural equation models in explaining the relationships between variables is more accurate than other methods and is closer to real conditions in terms of application; On the other hand, most of the researches about customer orientation and the factors affecting it have been carried out in non-sports service sectors, and it is necessary to study the status of customer orientation, work motivation, and factors related to it in the country's sports organizations. And especially sports and youth departments should also be studied. Therefore, the main issue of this research is whether there is a positive and significant relationship between internal marketing and customer orientation through the mediating variable of work motivation in the employees of sports and youth departments in the western provinces of the country? This goal-based research is applied and by nature, it is descriptive-analytical and this research is a survey. Study population was all employments and staff of General Sport and Young offices of west provinces of Iran (Hamadan, Kurdistan, Kermanshah) whose number was estimated to be 378 and Due to limited sample population was defined as census that finally 321 questionnaires are received. The data collection tool in this research was 3 standard questionnaires (Kahrabi Internal Marketing Questionnaire (2013), Hajat Customer Oriented Questionnaire (2002) and Bakshi et al.'s Career Motivation Questionnaire (2013) whose reliability was 0.80 using Cronbach's alpha test. and 0.74 and 0.76 were confirmed. Also, the validity of the research tool was confirmed by 10 expert professors. In order to determine the presence or absence of causal relationships between variables and to estimate and generalize the results obtained from structural equation modeling using PLS software was used. The research findings showed that internal marketing has a positive and significant effect on work motivation. Also, the results showed that internal marketing directly affects customer orientation. The findings showed that marketing Internal marketing has a greater effect on customer orientation through the mediating variable of work motivation and indirectly. Therefore, according to the results of this research, it is suggested that the managers of sports and youth departments should engage in internal marketing for customer orientation and providing better services. And the working motivation of your employees, pay special attention to the conditions to provide job satisfaction for the organization's employees. Based on the results of the present research, it seems that the managers of the general departments of sports and youth in the western provinces of the country avoid using methods based on force, coercion, and reprimand in the work environment. If employees work because of fear and to avoid punishment or reprimand, over time, they will suffer from specific psychological disorders in the work environment. It is also suggested to the senior managers of the general departments to involve the employees in the marketing affairs and budget and financial discussions in important decisions and ask them for their opinions on various matters related to their work, on different occasions. Praise be to them.